


no men but animals

by PtitsaSinitsa, whalersandsailors



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: (the dog doesn't die), Alternate Universe - Historical, Body Horror, Explicit Sexual Content, Happy Ending, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Polyamory, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Supernatural Elements, Temporary Amnesia, Werewolves, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:54:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 60,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25907677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PtitsaSinitsa/pseuds/PtitsaSinitsa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whalersandsailors/pseuds/whalersandsailors
Summary: The year is 1899, and Solomon Tozer has become disillusioned with the new world. When he finds himself in trouble, he has to hightail it to Dawson City looking for an out. Luckily for him, friends direct him to a cabin, left by a recently dead hermit. The details don’t matter to Solomon: not when he gains land of his own. With no neighbors but the trees, he settles down for what he hopes will be a peaceful existence.Peace, however, is hard to come by in Alaska, and winter is not finished with him.
Relationships: Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Solomon Tozer/Cornelius Hickey (past), Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little, Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer, Thomas Jopson/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 80
Kudos: 50
Collections: The Terror Big Bang 2020





	1. The Klondike

**Author's Note:**

> Written for **The Terror Big Bang 2020**. The gorgeous artwork is by [letmeinimafairy](https://letmeinimafairy.tumblr.com)/PtitsaSinitsa! 
> 
> A huge thank you to Poose for proofreading for me and shoutout to my various writing and sprint buddies, without whom this fic would never have been finished.
> 
> And thank YOU, everyone reading this self-indulgent fic that I've been incubating for almost eleven months. It's been a journey. \o/

_I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals._

  
**— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass**

⚒

⚒

**Spring, 1899.**

There is no gold, so they travel West.

Solomon and his party trail alongside the same worn path as every would-be Midas on the prowl for unimaginable wealth. The remnants of winter cling to the landscape around them, snowbanks painted black by mud and gravel. Solomon looks to the sky where the pale sun hides its face behind thick clouds along the bristly tops of firs surrounding the valley. The air is cold, and for as much as he is accustomed to hard labor, his lungs burn with each breath he takes, his legs trembling beneath him. Ever since he arrived in Alaska with his partner Bill Heather a year ago, his optimism has dwindled with every musty mine, every failed dig, every man buried beneath the rubble, and every river filled with enough silt to choke on. But no gold. He and Bill upended their lives, pouring their life’s savings into the venture, and for what?

He looks ahead of him, where Cornelius has taken the lead; occupied by the worn map in his hands. More carefree than Solomon, he whistles as his finger drags along the route they are taking along the Yukon.

A map is hardly necessary, Solomon thinks dourly to himself, since the four of them are sandwiched between other prospectors hiking on the trail. They are all going the same way, each man and woman as weary as the next. Some have abandoned their horses along the way, leaving the emaciated animals to expire under the open air; others have sat themselves along the rushing river, for a moment’s rest that might last a few minutes or several hours, when the exhaustion becomes too great and they lie on their sides to sleep with the horses.

Solomon tries to not dwell on them and add to his poor mood. He tugs at the reins of his mule when she throws her head and stamps her front hooves, the usual tantrum to show her displeasure.

“Come on, girl,” he soothes, “It’s not far. We’ll be there tonight, and you can rest.”

Manson leads their other mule, a few paces behind Cornelius. He also shoulders Cornelius’s pack for him, which Solomon cannot find the energy to criticize anymore. If Manson wants to carry more weight on Cornelius’s account, what business is it to him? He lowers his head, focusing more on his own feet than the pair ahead of him.

There is a hacking cough behind him. Solomon turns in time to see Gibson stumble onto his knees. His thin torso is bent sharp as a hook as he coughs violently into his hands.

Solomon lets go of his mule and rushes to Gibson’s side. As he helps him up, the coughs subside, but Gibson sags heavily onto him. There are spots of blood on his palms that he almost wipes away onto his trouser legs but thinks better of it, shoving his hands into his pockets when Manson stops walking and Cornelius calls back to them.

“Everything all right?”

Gibson stares unblinking at the ground. He is pale, and his eyes are vacant. Solomon jostles his shoulder, trying to convince him to stand up straight. Without looking at him, Gibson swallows and shrugs off his pack. He sways on his feet, ready to fall onto his haunches and sit in the middle of the path, uncaring if prospectors must veer around him as they pull their mules, spitting and grumbling all the while. Solomon catches him before he falls and takes his pack for him. He grunts at the added weight on his shoulders.

“Billy,” Solomon urges, his voice low, “Come on, stand up.”

Cornelius calls out again. “Solomon?”

“Yeah, we’re good.” He tries to keep the frown from his face as he wraps his arm around Gibson’s middle, holding him upright. Another cough wracks Gibson, but he keeps his lips pressed shut as he convulses. Solomon jerks his chin at Cornelius and Manson. “Go on. We’ll catch up.”

Manson is already walking away, continuing his steady gait. Cornelius remains for several long seconds. Solomon feels his eyes raking up and down both of them, appraising them for whatever purpose he is mulling over in his mind. He rarely says what he is truly thinking, and during the past year, the allure of such mystery has long since worn off for Solomon. Now, the scrutiny makes him wary.

Without another word, Cornelius turns and follows Manson. When he crests the hill, another coughing fit takes Gibson. His legs crumple beneath him, but Solomon holds him up. When the coughing ends, he moans pitifully against Solomon, his eyes screwed shut.

Solomon tries to think of something to say to cheer him up, but what do you tell a man who’s clearly dying? At least when Tommy Armitage went, it was sudden, but this slow waste of an illness, Solomon wouldn’t wish on anyone.

His mule wanders back toward them. Her tail flicks when flies land on her back, and as Solomon continues to ignore her — his attention focused on keeping Gibson upright — she snorts and plods toward the river. Solomon watches her go, thinking it’s not half a bad idea for them to take a proper sitting spell by the water. She noses the surface of the water, where the rapids slow to a placid, crystalline pool. With Gibson propped on his arm, Solomon leads him to the edge of the river. He finds them a dry rock to sit on, and as soon as the two of them sit themselves on the cool surface, Gibson hunches over with his head between his knees.

The prospectors continue their march along the path behind them. Not one man wastes his breath to ask after Gibson’s health or to holler a friendly _hullo_. It’s just as well, Solomon reasons, for he knows as well as every other being along the Yukon that most of them are running from the world and chasing dreams that dangle before them as impossible as diamonds falling from the sky. Not for the first time, he considers turning around, not to England, not that far, but to friends back east, to a more sensible pursuit, to a life spared the constant heartbreak and grief of gold. Bill was the smart one, meeting his sweetheart and staying behind in Dawson City to marry her while Solomon followed Cornelius like some stupid pup.

Solomon starts when Gibson slides off the rock onto his knees, but he only goes to the riverside, cupping some of the clear water in his palms. He drinks deeply, water slipping from between his fingers, catching on the wiry hairs of his beard and drenching the collar of his shirt. He cups more water and drinks again.

Along the ridge, the sun emerges from behind the trees. Solomon shields his eyes from the sudden glare. Gibson faces the sun and tips his head back.

“I didn’t want it like this,” he croaks, voice hoarse despite the water.

Solomon squints at him, struck by the strange image of Billy: his long neck with the jagged edge of a pronounced adam’s apple, his thin nose as sharp as a knife, and his hair burning gold in the spring sunlight. It looks as brilliant as a halo upon a martyred saint.

Solomon casts the thought from his mind, disliking the way it turns his stomach.

Gibson doesn’t look at him. Solomon wonders if he expects him to say something. He settles with a noncommittal grunt and looks toward the bend in the river, where it disappears behind the hill.

“Will I die here?” Gibson directs the question nowhere and everywhere at once; to Solomon, to the river, to the uncaring sunlight, to their peevish mule, but when he hears no answer, his head hangs. “I will, then. I will.”

For a moment, Solomon wonders if he is weeping, the way he dips his face into his chest. He hugs himself, his hands gripping the sleeves of his shirt tight enough to rip.

They have sat long enough. Solomon stands with a groan and joins Gibson by the shallows. He offers his hand, hauling Gibson to his feet. Retrieving the mule is harder as she stares balefully at Solomon. Under his breath he curses at her, having to step deeper into the river to grab her reins and tug her back onto land.

Gibson no longer needs his support to walk, but Solomon watches him from the corner of his eye, concerned that he might fall along the way.

They make their way back to the trail. The sun hides itself behind a cloud, and Solomon shivers from the chill of the sudden shadow. In silence, they all march West. He steps over the bleached bones of what might have been a horse’s ribcage — the transient monument of man’s greed and progress, left to rot until the earth swallows it whole.

⚒

The sun has set when they reach Fort Yukon. The settlement itself is far from noteworthy, as it consists of little more than cramped trappers’ quarters, storage sheds, one lonely saloon, and a log wall surrounding the perimeter. Most prospectors have pitched their tents outside the boundaries of the town, slinking past the gate in search of food and spirits.

Most of the tents are empty, and Solomon is hesitant to pitch his own until he finds Cornelius and Manson. He finds a clearing near a campfire to leave Gibson and the mule before he heads into the fort in search of the others. Music plays from inside the saloon, accompanied with the familiar hum of conversation. Solomon figures that his chances are highest there. He pushes the door open to find a low-ceilinged room cast in amber lamplight, hazy from pipesmoke and the heat of too many bodies crammed around tables and at the bar. He spies Manson’s hulking figure first, seated near the door. He nurses his mug with a miserable pout.

No sign of Cornelius, though Solomon scans the rest of the room, trying to locate the man’s slight figure and auburn hair.

He claps Manson on the back when he joins him at the bar. Manson flinches until he sees that it’s a friend, and the pout melts away into his easy smile.

“You got here all right?”

“Well enough.” Solomon signals the barkeep when he catches his eye. “I’ll have the same as my friend here.”

Once he has a mug of lukewarm beer, his thoughts drift to Gibson outside, and he drains half the mug in a couple gulps.

“Where’s Cornelius?”

Manson makes a vague gesture toward the back. Whether he means another room of the saloon or outside the back door, Solomon can only hazard a guess.

“He’s found someone to trade our mules for horses.”

Solomon arches an eyebrow.

“Did he? He say why?”

“No.” Manson shakes his head, the pout starting to slip back into place. “He’s been gone a while.”

“Right.”

Manson orders another beer, and Solomon stares for a long time at the other men in the room. The solo drinkers slouch at the bar, except for a pair of uniformed mounties who must be taking a break from their patrol to smoke and drink. At the tables placed around the room, games of dice or cards are set up, surrounding small piles of coins and dollars. Solomon dully remembers seeing a man stabbed over poker back in Skagway, and he wonders if a boomtown like this has attracted similar fools and ramblers.

Manson is pawing through his pockets for money to pay his tab. Solomon spares him the task by unfurling a few bills of his own.

He pats Manson’s shoulder again before handing him the money. Manson stares at it blankly.

“For your drinks and mine. Should be enough for a few pints more,” Solomon says. “When Cornelius shows up, tell him I’ve set up camp with Billy outside town.”

Manson bobs his head and takes the money. Solomon looks toward the back door again, but there is still no sign of Cornelius. He shakes off an odd feeling of anticipation that there is something rumbling under his feet, some earthquake that Cornelius knows about, and he ain’t telling. As he leaves the saloon, he reminds himself that he and Cornelius don’t owe each other any sort of confidence. Not anymore. They left that behind south of Dawson, in a mildewed tent, with Solomon nursing a hangover and Cornelius masking his temper behind a strained grin. There are days when Solomon misses the man’s sweetness like he would miss a limb cut off, but he has seen how Cornelius uses people up like fire ripping through wood. He did it to Gibson. He did it to Solomon.

He sighs, glaring toward the mountains where the snowcapped peaks glow in the sunset. Best to not get sentimental with that which can kill you. Besides, he needs to focus on setting up camp before nightfall, no matter where Cornelius is or what plans he is cooking.

⚒

Solomon is poking at the fire’s ashes when Cornelius returns. Manson and a dark-haired man are close on his heels. True to Manson’s word, their mule is gone, replaced by the mustachioed man who eyes Solomon with something bordering on disdain. Nothing to account for the rumor of a horse, or any hint of a reason why Cornelius wants to trade their mules. Manson drops onto the ground beside him. He rubs his hands together, puffing warm air over them as he sits as close to the flame as he can without catching fire. Despite the chilly evening, Solomon’s skin feels tight, from having sat here over an hour, his nostrils filling with smoke.

Cornelius nimbly folds his legs beneath him, when his eyes pass over the fire and the camp.

“Where’s Billy?”

Solomon tosses his stick into the fire, jerking a thumb toward the tent directly behind himself.

“Sleeping.”

Cornelius’s brow rises high on his face. He slinks into the tent without a word.

The man sits opposite Solomon. He doesn’t introduce himself, and despite his earlier scowl, he shrinks from Solomon’s stare.

“Did Cornelius get his horse, then?” He directs the question to Manson, his eyes fixed on the other man.

Manson scratches his cheek, thinking a moment. “I think so. We sold Lacey, and…” His eyes dart to the stranger. “You’re going to buy Maple, too?”

The stranger shrugs. “I can give you something for your trouble, yeah.”

Solomon chews over his response. “It’s hardly trouble for us to unload a pair of bone-tired mules on you.”

The stranger says nothing.

Cornelius leaves the tent shortly after. He kneels on the ground beside Solomon and pulls out a folded bundle of dollar bills. He splits the bundle in half and hands it to Solomon.

“What’s this?”

“Your cut. Our friend Mr. Des Voeux here is kind enough to purchase both mules and provide us a discount on a pair of horses.”

Solomon counts the money, satisfied with the amount. He slides it into his boot.

“Only two?” he says.

Cornelius is frowning at the fire.

“Billy’s unwell. Two can ride together, or one of us walk alongside.” The frown deepens. “We’ll make do, Solomon. We always do.”

The stranger, Mr. Des Voeux, lights a hand-rolled cigarette. He takes a long drag before offering it to Cornelius. He moves around the fire to sit next to him as they pass the cigarette back and forth. Solomon pulls himself to his feet, mumbling to Manson that he’s taking a leak. He walks some distance away until the firelight is dim, and he steps behind some bushes. A breeze bites through him after he’s done and fixing his trousers, and he shivers.

The quiet of the wilderness gets under his skin, even after living in it for over a year. It is heavy, muting everything around him but the beat of his heart and his shallow breaths. It isn’t the quiet that disturbs him but what lurks just beneath; the wind rustling the tall grass, some unseen creature disturbing the ground a few paces away, a bird shrieking into the dead night air, all accompanied by the faint drum of the settlement.

Looking up at the sky, where the stars are bright enough that Solomon fears for a moment that his feet will leave the ground and he will tumble headlong into that glittering abyss, he realizes how much of a stranger he is here.

He tries to shrug off the notion and makes his way back toward camp. He avoids the fire, bowing into his tent instead.

⚒

Hours later, he wakens to hands on his waist and lips on his neck. His fist flies up, connecting with ribs, and he hooks his foot around his assailant’s calf, flipping him easily. The man beneath him wheezes when the wind is knocked out of him, and it is not until Solomon has him pinned with a forearm against his neck that he realizes it is Cornelius. He can barely see his face in the early dawn light, but there is a haunting familiarity in the shape of Cornelius pressed up against him.

“What are you doing?” he demands, keeping his voice low as he sits up.

Cornelius rubs his throat and smiles. “You always know how to make me feel welcome.”

Solomon isn’t gentle as he shoves him off. He gives Cornelius’s side a kick as he settles back onto his bedroll. For half a second, he wonders if Cornelius will be brave enough to try again, to crawl toward him on hands and knees, the jut of his chin softening as he looks up at Solomon through his lashes.

Solomon bites back a groan, irritated by his own hazy arousal. He covers his face with his palm, waiting for whatever Cornelius will do.

He nearly recoils when Cornelius touches his shoulder.

“I remember when you wanted me in your bed.”

His voice is soft. Hurt, even.

Solomon refuses to look at him. “You can find yourself any man, can’t you?”

“Am I not allowed to miss you, Solomon?”

He stays quiet, and Cornelius moves away with a sigh. He hears him shuffling in the tent, but Solomon keeps his hand over his eyes. He doesn’t want to see the anger on Cornelius’s face. He doesn’t want to see the regret. He doesn’t trust himself enough.

Cornelius opens the flap to leave.

“Don’t sleep too late,” he says after a pause, his voice oddly serious. “We have an early start.”

And he is gone.

⚒

Solomon sleeps for another hour, though it is far from restful. His ears perk at the slightest sound, and he jolts awake, his legs kicking. He groans quietly as he rolls onto his side, damning the ache in his knees and low back. The noise of the surrounding camp grows louder by the minute, and it is impossible for him to ignore it any longer. He opens his eyes slowly, and he can see sunlight peeking through the cracks in the canvas over his head.

Cornelius, of course, is absent. The memory of his early morning visit slips from Solomon’s mind like a distant dream, and he doesn’t dwell on it. He sits up, sliding on his shirt and boots. He combs his hair with his fingers, yawning as he rolls up his blankets and secures them onto the top of his pack. He finds his coat and tugs that on, too.

He goes outside, dropping his pack on the ground as he starts to disassemble his tent. Gibson’s tent is still up, but he doesn’t see Hickey’s. Manson doesn’t have a tent; he usually beds beside one of the three, what with his habit of being spooked by the slightest noise. The absence of the third tent, however, is disquieting.

Solomon glances around the camp as he finishes folding up the canvas and tying the poles in a bundle. Nearby, several men stand and sit around a cooking fire. The scent of sizzling fat wafts by Solomon’s face. It makes his mouth water and stomach rumble, but he ignores his hunger as he goes to the front of Gibson’s tent.

“Billy? You awake?”

No answer.

Solomon glances at the other prospectors in the camp. He doesn’t see Cornelius, or Manson for that matter. He frowns and pulls aside the flap.

“Billy, have you seen Cornelius—”

He stops.

The tent is picked over, tools and books abandoned on the ground. There is a lump where Gibson still lies in the bedroll. Solomon can see tufts of his curls peeking from under the blanket. With dread growing ever larger in his chest, Solomon stands, letting the flap close. He glances over his shoulder toward the fire. There’s a group of four men huddled around it, sharing bacon and beans. Still no sign of Cornelius or Manson.

He opens the flap again and fully enters the tent.

“Billy?” He tries giving his shoulder a shake. “Wake up. Cornelius and Magnus are…” _Gone?_

When he doesn’t stir, Solomon shakes him harder. He feels limp under the blanket. In a panic, Solomon turns him onto his back. He gasps when Billy’s eyes stare blankly at him.

Strange, how a man who looked like a walking corpse in his last days looks more alive in death.

Solomon lets go of him, and Billy falls back onto his bedroll, head lolling to the side. The sticky remains of blood stain his shirt, and a wave of pity washes over Solomon at the sight. The poor man must have drowned in his own blood. Gingerly, Solomon lifts the top of his blanket. Nausea wraps around his throat when he sees the stain traveling further along Billy’s shirt. He peels the collar away from his skin. Some of the blood is still damp, but the parts that are dry cling to the fabric. Solomon winces at the squelching noise of partly dried blood and the shirt separating.

Though it is hardly the stench of a fresh corpse lying in his own fluids that makes Solomon stop breathing.

A bloodied knife is lying beside Billy on the bedroll. Solomon’s squeamishness flees as he yanks the shirt down and tilts Billy’s head up, revealing a neat stab wound right at the line of his jaw. As neat an incision as the work of a surgeon. Solomon’s breath comes fast and ragged now. He is not stupid enough to deny the culprit, but why would Cornelius have felt it necessary to do away with a friend, at a settlement? He cannot begin to fathom what his intentions might have been.

He remembers hands pawing at him earlier, and with a jolt, he pats down his pockets. He has an inner lining in his trousers, where he had stashed the money Cornelius gave him the evening prior.

It is empty and the money gone.

As if abandoning him to the wolves weren’t bad enough, Cornelius has left Solomon with the parting gift of Gibson’s corpse. He heaves a deep sigh as he thinks how impossible it will be for him to convince any mountie that he was not responsible for the man’s murder. He doesn’t know what cock and bull story he can conjure to make any of this look forgivingly on him.

But for now, he has a body, and the body of a friend. Gibson deserves some decency in death. Solomon can admit that.

Steeling himself, he leans over the corpse once more and wonders if he should go through the trouble of changing Billy’s clothes. He has to have a second shirt, at least. With this thought in mind, he plucks the knife from where it has rolled against Billy. Odd that Cornelius would leave that behind, since a knife is as much a limb to a man as his own hand and too useful a tool to abandon.

Solomon’s whole body goes numb when he realizes that it is his knife, the monogram _S.T._ engraved on the handle.

⚒

Gibson was a practical man. Solomon hopes that he would be sympathetic to his plight, as he leaves his body as he found it. None of them were religious men, and Solomon wasn’t the type to let a fear of Christian hellfire dictate his life, but a paranoid corner of his mind wonders whether there will be some eternal judgment for his actions or if the spirit of Gibson might be disturbed in his journey to whatever _after_ he believed in. Solomon has more present and tangible concerns, and he knows he is in for trouble if he doesn’t hightail it out of Fort Yukon.

His body works automatically as he reclaims his pack. He digs through the bag, searching through whatever is left, whatever Cornelius didn’t bother to take. What little food he had is gone, and the crumpled, ancient bills he kept in the pack are gone, too. Solomon grits his teeth as he curses that son of a bitch. He doesn’t even have his goddamn mule anymore.

He squeezes his eyes shut from vertigo, and he tells himself to breathe. He has to keep moving. Time is slipping away. He remembers seeing horses tethered outside the camp when he and Billy arrived yesterday, near the road heading east.

He hefts his pack over both shoulders and passes through the camp, resisting the desire to hurry. The men at the fire offer him food, and he accepts some warm bread, declining the offer of tobacco as graciously as he can. He has a dead man’s blood trapped under his nails, and he’ll be damned if the men notice his hand shaking as he takes the bread.

He walks toward the edge of the camp outside the settlement. His heart is racing, but he outwardly stays calm. No need to make noise, no need to draw unwanted attention. He glances behind him, scouting for anyone armed, civilian or mountie. He sees neither. Before he misses the window of opportunity, he walks to the horses and starts untying the one farthest from the fort. If any fortune is smiling on Solomon after the affair of waking up to Billy’s dead body, the horses’ owner might be in town, might be at the saloon, might be lazing the morning away in his bed, might be anywhere else where they can’t see a scruffy, wild-eyed man secure the saddle on their copper-colored mount and start leading it down the path away from the settlement.

Solomon forces himself to walk. Sweat clings to his back, and every step feels as though he is dragging himself through a swamp. He does not look back, and no sound of alarm is shouted behind him.

He lets out a breath when he turns a bend. Fort Yukon slips out of sight and, with it, any plans for Solomon’s future. He mounts the horse and digs his heels into its side, spurring it to run.


	2. A Cabin in the Woods

**Summer, 1899**.

Dawson City is a hub of activity, brought to life by the thousands of souls passing through. The roads and buildings themselves thrive with life, built off the dreams of every man and woman who lodge here; be it for a day, a week, or in the case of Bill Heather, the foreseeable future. Solomon knows where his house is. His wife Maggie is the daughter of a rather well-off businessman, and the house was his gift to Maggie and Bill when they became engaged.

Solomon stands on a street corner with his stolen horse held tightly by the reins. He watches the house long enough to see Bill return home. Maggie — the swell of her belly obvious even from a distance — greets him on the porch. Solomon tries to stay out of sight. Every person he passed from Fort Yukon to Dawson felt like a threat. Horse thieves and murderers aren’t exactly uncommon, but Solomon wears his guilt as blatantly as a brand across his face. He needs help, but the last thing he wants is to bring trouble to his friend’s doorstep.

He hesitates long enough on the street that the sun dips low. The horse fusses behind him and nips him on the shoulder.

“Hey!” He swats at her, but she only stares back at him with disdain. “Fine, fine, I’m going.”

The streets are emptying out anyway, so there is no one to watch this haggard, filthy stranger stagger toward the Heathers’ home. He ties the horse to a post out front before approaching the door. He can smell food wafting from an open window, accompanied by chatter, and with a deep breath, he summons the courage to knock.

The chatter stops, and he hears footsteps hurry to the door. It is Maggie who answers, and for a fleeting second, as she stares at him with wide eyes, Solomon worries that she doesn’t recognize or remember him. She shakes her head, a wide grin growing on her face.

“I know you!” She pulls him into a tight hug. “Bill, come here, it’s your friend.”

She pulls him into the parlor, where the scent of cooking is stronger. She sets him on the edge of a faded blue sofa, where he sinks into the comfortable cushions. He feels massive in the room, with its pretty curtains, lace doilies, and decorative plates on the mantle. He folds his hands over his knees as Maggie bustles out of the room, calling Bill’s name again.

Bill enters behind Maggie. He is dressed down to his shirtsleeves, with a comb in his hands and his hair damp, but same as his wife, he beams when he sees Solomon. He marches across the room to him, grabbing Solomon’s hand in a firm handshake before pulling him to his feet and hugging him.

“Didn’t think I’d see you again this soon.” Bill steps back, hands on both of Solomon’s shoulders as he looks him up and down. “You look _horrible_.”

Solomon laughs, sounding as tired as he feels. “I’ve been on the road a few days.”

“I’d say,” Bill says, returning the laugh. “Maggie, we’ll have a guest for dinner, looks like. Do you have a place you’re staying?”

Solomon says that he does not. The words are barely out his mouth before Bill insists that he stay there.

“I don’t want to put you out,” Solomon feebly protests.

From the kitchen, as seen through a narrow arched doorway, Maggie mirrors Bill’s offer.

“Nonsense,” she says, waving her spoon as emphasis. “You are _family,_ Solomon Tozer. And you will stay as long as you need to.”

He nods mutely, the fight draining from him. He lets Bill lead him to one of the chairs at the kitchen table, and he sits with a grateful sigh. His stomach loudly gurgles, making his face and ears burn with embarrassment, but Bill puts him at ease, slapping his shoulder as he moves past.

“Now that’s what we like to hear,” he crows, winking at Solomon, “A man with an appetite.”

Solomon weakly returns the smile, his hands fidgeting once more in his lap. With Maggie’s back turned to them, Bill’s face grows more serious. He stares at Solomon for a long time, curiosity and worry plain on his face. Solomon shakes his head at him, and Bill holds up a hand, _Not now, fine._

But they will talk, Solomon realizes with some dread. He’ll have to tell all.

⚒

Maggie retires to the bedroom after dinner. Bill insists that he and Solomon can clean up, and she looks grateful as she holds her lower back and leaves them. For a few blessed minutes, Solomon thinks he is off the hook, but after the table is cleared and the dishes put away, Bill tells him that he would like to smoke.

“Let’s talk outside,” he says, tugging on a jacket on account of the late hour. “Wouldn’t want to wake Maggie.”

Solomon goes outside first, sitting in one of the chairs with his feet stretched out before him. The sun has just set, and the chill of night is fast approaching. He huddles in his coat, staring glumly down the street when Bill joins him. They pass a pipe back and forth for a few minutes, neither man speaking, and Solomon finds himself relaxing. Fresh food and a warm pipe have a way of putting a man at ease.

“That your horse?” Bill asks around the stem of the pipe, nodding toward the mare where Solomon tied her up.

“I reckon so,” Solomon says.

“You reckon?” Bill snorts. He glances at Solomon from the corner of his eye, handing him the pipe. “You’re not in any trouble are you? There’s talk of mounties looking for a man.”

Solomon nearly fumbles the pipe. His hands shake when he brings it to his mouth.

“That right? Who are they looking for?”

“Don’t know for certain, but they think it’s just one man, on account of a single missing horse apparently.”

Solomon inhales, frowning fiercely at the sky. He can feel Bill’s eyes on him.

“Sol, you and I have known each other for ages. You can trust me.” He repeats the question; “Are you in trouble?”

He thinks on it, lets the smoke sit in his chest for a long while before he exhales. “I might be. Hickey and Manson left. Gibson’s dead.”

Bill hums, taking the pipe back. “And the horse?”

Solomon shakes his head with a halfhearted laugh and a snort. “What do you think?”

They smoke in silence for several more minutes until Bill extinguishes the pipe. Stars dot the darkening sky as the last bit of sunlight fades behind the mountains. He feels safer in the dark, less suspicious of anyone passing on the street. He can’t see them, and they can’t see him. He shoves his hands into his pockets, starting to stand.

“I won’t stay long,” he says.

Bill cuts him off, “You shut up. You stay here as long as you need. We’ll find a place for your horse, and we’ll figure it out.” He fiddles with the pipe, a deep frown on his face as though he’s trying to remember something.

“This is Hickey’s mess,” Solomon says with a sigh. “He left me with it, and I’ll deal with it. I just need to stop somewhere for a bit. Get off the road.”

He can’t stay here. He knows that. With Bill’s respectable job at the mill, Maggie bustling about their quaint little home with a song on her lips and a baby in her belly, Solomon would fit as poorly as a glove ripping at the seams. All he needs is for the news to blow over, give or take a week. Dead men in Alaska are far from rare, and the ghosts along the Yukon are plentiful. He’ll find his way. He knows he will.

Bill stands, pocketing the pipe and patting Solomon on the arm. “Well, stay here for a few days at least. Maggie will love the company, even with all your grousing and scowling.”

He laughs when Solomon swats at his arm. He leans on the porch’s rail, descending into a thoughtful silence as he looks at the mare and then back to Solomon.

“You know, there is something that could work.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” Solomon rests his arms on the rail beside Bill.

“There’s a piece of land for sale. Middle of nowhere mind you, it’s about a four day hike from here, but it’s already got a couple buildings on it and a garden. Man who owned it died, and his son-in-law’s trying to get rid of it.”

The idea is certainly appealing, the thought of having a home again, a place to call his own.

“Bill, I don’t have a dollar to my name, not after…” He pauses.

“I got some saved up.” Solomon whips his head toward him, ready to shoot down any offers of money. “No, no, you _listen_ to me, Sol. You’ve gotten me out of a bind before. Let me help you now, damn it.”

Solomon drags a hand across his face, letting his head hang. “I can’t accept that. You got a family now, Bill.”

Bill’s hand is heavy where it rests on his back, between his shoulder blades.

“’You’re my family, too.”

⚒

Solomon visits the cabin only once before he commits to buying.

It was all pretense anyway, letting the bespectacled and nervous son-in-law (Mr. Arthur Horne, Jr of Horne & Sons’ Financial Advisory and Loans — some boomtown mix of bankers and lawyers) show him around the property. For the entire trip from Dawson City, Mr. Horne had successfully kept a running conversation, spouting off knowledge of Dawson City and nearby mines, names of trees and flowers, tricks and tips he knows for _properly_ fishing or cutting wood, yessiree. It’s a wonder Solomon kept his sanity.

The day they arrive at the cabin, it’s raining hard enough for a second Noah’s flood. Solomon gets a brief glimpse of the clearing, the barn just past the cabin and the rectangular garden in between, before he and Horne hurry inside the cabin to dry off. The roof’s in poor condition, much to Horne’s chagrin, and he throws himself about the room, tossing pots under each leak. He assures Solomon that the barn has fared better, though his words are punctuated by a strong gust of wind splattering rain against one of the windows. The glass rattles loudly, and even across the room, Solomon feels the cold, wet draft slipping around the edges of the window’s frame.

He crosses the room and looks out the window, fascinated by the sway of the firs outside, their branches close enough to brush against the roof of the cabin. He sees a path that winds around the cabin and leads into the woods, but it disappears into the underbrush and the sharp incline of the hill out back.

“The fireplace works,” Horne says as he pats the stone mantel. “You’ll want to clean out the chimney some, but it’s a sturdy old thing. Bedroom’s through here—” He flails, coughing as a cobweb slaps him across the face. “Ah, it’s ah, small, but there’s a wardrobe already in there. The fireplace heats it up right nicely in winter.”

Solomon stays by the window, turning to appraise the room: one half is a kitchen with a large iron stove and crooked cabinets, and the other side, where he stands, is a slipshod parlor, curved in a semi-circle before the massive hearth.

“We’re selling his two cows, as well. He had a couple goats—” Horne adjusts one of the pots as a new leak springs in the middle of the room’s ceiling. “If the scoundrels haven’t wandered off, that is. The land is hard to farm, or so I’ve been told. Do you farm, Mr. Tozer?” He pats at his jacket, nervously checking his watch before stuffing it back into his pocket. His spectacles slip down his nose, but he doesn’t fix them.

“Some,” Solomon lies.

The man flinches at a loud crack of thunder. His hands clasp together, and he smiles uneasily at Solomon.

“Good, excellent,” he says weakly.

Solomon crosses the room, wrapping his hand around the rung of a ladder that disappears into a loft overhead. He climbs high enough to peer over the edge of the landing. The loft is narrow and tight; he doubts he could fully stand in it, but he sees more chests, mildewed chairs, an unused bed frame, and an old door lying on its side. It’s a treasure trove of junk.

He comes down the ladder again.

“You’re selling all the furniture with it?”

Horne starts. His spectacles slip more. “Yes, we are as a matter of fact! Everything in the cabin and barn sold as is! It’s a good place to start a family.” He pats the top of the kitchen table, grimacing when a thick clump of dust clings to the back of his hand. “Do you have a wife, Mr. Tozer? My Annabelle and I would move here ourselves if we didn’t have three children already and a fourth on the way.” 

Lightning strikes in the woods, near enough that the crash of thunder shakes the whole cabin. Horne falls into one of the kitchen chairs, and its rotted leg crumbles beneath him. His leg kicks out as he stumbles, colliding with one of the pots, upending water onto the floor with a splash and clatter.

Solomon catches the man before he slams his head onto the floor, and Horne thanks him with a thin chuckle. He finally adjusts his spectacles.

“It needs some work, of course,” he admits with a vague gesture at the room.

“Yeah,” Solomon agrees. “It’s perfect.”

⚒

On a muggy day in June, the air humid enough that Solomon’s skin has acquired a semi-permanent sheen of sweat for the past several days, he and Bill take advantage of the never-setting sun and rise early to pack their cart with tools, food, a stack of wooden planks, a cage with two laying hens, and a mountain of hay bales strapped carefully into place.

“That gonna be too heavy to haul?” Solomon watches dubiously while Bill hitches up his behemoth of a horse. His mare is too small to pull the cart, so he plans to ride her alongside.

“Nah, Trigger’s a brute.” Bill pats the horse’s flank with a fond smile. “He’ll be fine.”

Maggie also watches from the porch of the house, having risen with them at their ungodly hour to make sure, as she primly put it, that he and Bill remembered to eat some breakfast before they go roaming in the woods like a couple of vagrants. However, as she circles the cart and scratches Trigger behind his ears, she confesses to Solomon that she regrets not joining them.

Bill overhears her and gives a hearty laugh. “Maggie, it’s a four day hike.”

“Have you ever known me to faint at a little walking?”

“We can’t have you giving birth in the wilderness, love.”

She swats at him.

“The baby’s not due for a month. I reckon I’d be just fine and dandy, thank you.”

Solomon tilts his hat on his head to block the glare of the sun. “Bill’s right though. The woods ain’t a good place for a baby. Might get snatched by wolves.”

Maggie frowns. “That is not funny, Solomon Tozer.”

Bill gives her another kiss on the cheek. “It’s all in good fun, love.”

When she harrumphs, he nuzzles her cheek until she giggles and pushes him. Solomon pointedly looks away. Once Bill clambers onto the seat of the cart, he tells Maggie, “I’ll go get this one settled, and be back in a week. You won’t even know I was gone.”

“I doubt that, love.”

Solomon clicks his tongue and starts down the road. He hears the sharp crack of the reins and the high-pitched creak of wagon wheels as Bill follows.

“Be safe, both of you.” Maggie waves from the porch. “Don’t let wolves eat you neither.”

⚒

Sleep is elusive under a midnight sun, and with the added light, excitement speeding up their pace, they shorten the journey by a day. There is naught but a single wisp of a cloud in the sky when they arrive at the cabin, and at the high elevation, the air is crisper than it was by the river in Dawson. The scent of pines and firs is fragrant, fanning around Solomon’s head as cleanly as the birds chattering in their branches.

The cart bumbles over a few rocks in the overgrown path, but once Bill has pulled in front of the barn, he climbs down and immediately begins to unhitch Trigger. He digs out a handful of feed from the back to give the horse before he leads him toward the barn. Solomon dismounts his mare — Cricket, as he has come to call the jumpy and capricious creature — and holds her reins loosely as he walks toward the cabin, past the remains of a woodpile and along the garden.

In better light and weather, he notices truly for the first time the odd shape of it.

It has two downstairs rooms; kitchen and parlor to the left, cramped bedroom to the right. Immediately above, of course, is the attic that Solomon briefly glimpsed on his last visit, but it is the precariously leaning addition that grabs his attention today. 

Attached to the attic is a narrow-gabled, square tower that rises from the sod roof like a misshapen chimney. Several windows are cut into the siding like watchdogs peering upon the land. The hermit must have built onto the cabin through the years, but as Solomon looks at it, he wonders what the hell compelled the man. If it weren’t for the storm during his first visit, he’d think that one strong gust would make the structure snap in half.

He ties Cricket to a post before he continues his examination of the cabin’s exterior. He circles around back. Here he finds windows into both the parlor and the bedroom, as well as a padlocked door leading into what he assumes is the cellar. He hears the faint trickle of running water. With a parting glance toward the barn, he starts hiking up the hill behind the cabin to investigate. He has his rifle with him, slung over his shoulder, and while he hopes he won’t need it, he’s no fool to the forests here and all the creatures they host.

As it turns out, the creek is not far from the cabin, and it’s almost large enough to call itself a river. It twists around tree trunks and boulders until it extends into an oblong pool. The water is clear enough that Solomon can see it runs deep. Sunlight glints off the fish swimming toward the bottom. Solomon makes a note that he should try his hand at fishing and see what the river has to offer.

He hears Bill calling his name back at the cabin, and he jogs the quarter mile back to the clearing. Bill huffs when he sees him.

“You drag a man to your house and then abandon him?” Bill must sense Solomon’s cheerful mood because his grin grows wider. “Come on, let’s head inside. I don’t know about you, but I’m near starved.”

⚒

The kitchen is barely functional. Solomon spends twenty minutes clearing the stove’s pipe so it can ventilate properly. Bill fetches them wood from the stack outside. The logs he brings back are misshapen and crooked, and Bill tuts as he loads the stove, remarking offhandedly that the old man’s supply of chopped wood is puny.

“That’s one of the first things I’d fix, if I was you. Hate to get to winter and not have plenty of firewood, I can tell you that.”

Once the stove is working, they have a quick lunch of beans and bread.

“How’s the barn?” Solomon asks from over his bowl. “I haven’t been inside yet.”

Bill snorts around a mouthful of bread, talking with his mouth full, “Better condition than the cabin. Either the man was finicky with his animals or he never set foot in there.”

After lunch, they make a list of the biggest repairs the cabin requires; plans to fix cracks in the walls, patch leaks in the roof, and build a fence around a corner of the yard for the cows and chickens. Most tasks will be left to Solomon, but Bill plans to stay a full day to help him fashion a coop off the barn, one of the farm’s more pressing needs.

“I’m telling you what you already know,” Bill says, as he pokes his finger into the wall where some of the chinking has come loose. “But you’ll want this cabin packed as tightly as a babe put to bed come winter. Even the tiniest crack makes a difference.”

Winter feels like a lifetime away, as it always does in summer when the sun is high in the sky, the breeze is light and balmy, and birdsong soothes the ear. Solomon tries to memorize the way the sun lands on the trees and wildflowers and overgrown garden and the gray wood of the barn.

He knows how sorely he will miss it once winter comes.

⚒

Solomon leaves Bill on the porch where he’s carried all the furniture in preparation for scrubbing the floors and patching the walls. He tells him that he wants to check out the tower, and Bill laughs when he calls it that. Solomon rather defensively demands to know what else he should call the bizarre structure, but Bill only waves his hand with a chuckle as Solomon stomps away.

Once he is in the loft, he ducks his head, forehead grazing against the beams. The attic is emptier than Solomon realized. Most of the unused furniture lies near the door, and the remainder of the loft is unoccupied. A second ladder leads to a trapdoor in the roof. Mindful of cobwebs and crossbeams, Solomon heads to the ladder and climbs.

The first room he encounters is tremendously messy. The floor is covered in a stained canvas, and the room itself is crammed with shelves of paint, haphazardly organized brushes, and splintered slats of wood. The window is larger than it appeared from outside, and the room is bright. An easel lies propped on the wall, beside another ladder leading to the next floor.

Sidestepping a bucket, Solomon ascends the second ladder. It leads to a small room with walls that slant sharply until they connect at the peak in the ceiling, and the floorboards gap enough that Solomon can see straight down to the paint room. There is one window, facing east, and beneath it is a chair and side table, made comfortable by an old quilt and braided rug. There is even a tiny wood stove in the corner with its jagged chimney nestled against the angled ceiling. Opposite the window, there are paintings of various sizes leaning against the wall. Curious, Solomon picks through them, holding them to the light to see.

Most are Romantic interpretations of the surrounding landscape. One showcases towering, rock-laden mountains covered in dark firs and blooming with the bright yellow flowers of summer. Another is a wintry scene, with a cabin covered in a thick layer of snow; its windows are glowing eyes, and from the chimney floats a spiral of smoke. It’s a comforting image and, based on the next several paintings Solomon finds, a popular subject for the painter.

One wintry landscape is different from the rest however, where a series of paw prints mar the otherwise pristine snow. In the night sky, a crescent moon crowds the treetops, surrounded by snake-like twists of green and blue aurora. The cabin is dark with no lit windows or smoke curling from the chimney.

The next painting is almost identical, but the more Solomon stares at it, he sees the differences. The moon is larger. More paw prints dig into the snow, left by some unseen beast. And between the gnarled trees glow several sets of eyes, painted with the same bright yellow that had graced the cabin windows before. Were it not for the pupils hastily dotted within each yellow shape, Solomon might have thought they represented fairy lights or something else equally fanciful and harmless.

Solomon feels the hair on the nape of his neck rise. His vision becomes unfocused. In the painting, the trees and cabin become fuzzy around the edges, and the eyes shift as though each of them turn their gaze to him.

A bird caws outside the window in mid-flight, and Solomon jerks, dropping the painting to the floor. The bright summer sunlight spills over it, making the black paint look gray and the woods less ominous. Embarrassed, he crouches to pick up the painting and replace it against the wall with the others.

After a second, he turns the painting around so that it faces the wall before he climbs down the ladder.

⚒

“Do you know anything about the man who lived here?” Solomon keeps the question light as he focuses his attention on the other side of the coop where he’s fixing the outdoor ramp to the yard.

Bill shrugs, removing the nails from his mouth before he speaks. “Not much.”

“Why did his family not want it, you think?

Bill’s eyes twinkle at Solomon. “You having second thoughts?”

“No.” They work in silence for several minutes. “It’s just that it seems strange that they’re leaving the house exactly as the man left it. He lived alone, yeah?”

“I believe so.” Bill sets aside his hammer. “Now, I don’t know much because I don’t care for talk, but I hear gossip at the mill. Lot of folk thought this man was mad. Whether he went mad before he lived here or he went mad from loneliness, who can say.” He begins hammering nails into the coop’s siding again. “When he died and people got to talking about his land, I heard that he came out here after his wife died. But that could also be as real as gold in the Yukon. You know how people like to make some sense where there ain’t any.”

Solomon tries to dismiss the persistent worry that all this is too idyllic. Where is the rot in the wood, and when will the cabin’s walls fall around him, trapping him inside and killing him just as it did the hermit? He focuses on hammering the boards into place, the thud of metal on wood enough to drown out his thoughts.

⚒

Between the two of them, Solomon and Bill finish the chicken’s coop as well as fix the stuck door on the barn, patch the cabin’s chinking, and build a new table for the kitchen and a bed for the bedroom. The rest of the supplies are sitting just inside the main room: blankets, linens, cookware, dried food, and tinned food.

Bill loads the cart with just enough food to get him back to Dawson. Solomon is struck by a sudden surge of loneliness as he watches him. He will finally be alone in a few short minutes, and while the idea is exhilarating, he wonders how long it will take for the newfound freedom to lose some of its luster.

He pokes around the garden as Bill finishes up. The plot has grown wild in the hermit’s absence, and while there is not much variety in the crops, the produce has flourished. The leaves are enormous, each plant a healthy verdant shade. Solomon kneels beside one and digs his fingers into the dirt, savoring how cool the earth is to touch. The hermit might have been mad, but he clearly loved this land; seems only a proper homage for Solomon to continue his work.

Bill finishes hitching Trigger to the cart and walks toward the garden, letting out a low whistle. “Must say, Sol, we came here to mine gold, and look at us now: miller and farmer. Who do you think is laughing upstairs?”

Solomon stands, wiping his hands on his trousers. “It would have to be a joke for someone to laugh.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

They clasp hands, giving each other a mighty shake before Bill hauls him into a tight hug.

“You’ll be all right, if I go?”

Solomon snorts. “Yes. Go back to your wife.”

Bill is reluctant, releasing his hold on Solomon. He suggests that Solomon fix the roof next, lest another storm come through and damage the cabin’s interior. But it is summer yet, and Solomon feels mighty at ease. He knows there’s more work to do, but he’s thinking of fashioning himself a fishing rod and hiking to the creek. The sun won’t set tonight, and Solomon feels wealthy with time.

After climbing onto the cart, Bill insists that Solomon visit him and Maggie later in the season.

“Or us visit you,” he amends, “After the baby is born, of course. Might do you well to have a lady’s touch around the house. Maggie knows a thing or two about canning. Could help you wrangle those vegetables you got yonder.”

With a grin and a shake of his head, Solomon holds up his hand to stop Bill from continuing.

“It’s four days back to Dawson. Go home. Go home to your wife. Give her a big ol’ kiss from me.” He dodges the half-hearted kick from Bill with a laugh.

“You’re a useless bastard, Solomon.”

“I know.”

Solomon stands on the stoop of the cabin and watches Bill disappear out of sight.

Once he can no longer hear the squeak of the wheels, Solomon looks at his clearing. While the birds sing loud enough that he doesn’t think of the land as quiet, it is less noisy than hiking alongside other prospectors, or sitting around a campfire with Cornelius’s constant prattle, or listening to the heartbeat of mining camps where hundreds of men would huddle in tight quarters with no privacy among them, or sleeping in towns like Dawson where one might find refuge behind some walls but where noise was plentiful from neighbors and from the street.

No, the sound here was so unobtrusive to be as simple as breathing.

Solomon will spend the rest of the day fishing. The roof can wait.

⚒

By the end of July, Solomon is proud of all he has accomplished by himself. He shaped the previous garden into something lucrative; the leafy greens and vegetables growing massive under the endless summer sun. He built a twig fence around the perimeter to discourage any nibblers, though the foxes and rabbits are unaccustomed to people and grow bold when hungry. Solomon has had to chase a number of them back into the woods when they were foolhardy enough to poke their nose through the fence with Solomon inches away on his hands and knees, pulling weeds.

The garden has been such a success that he’s already planning an extension. Tilling the extra land is no easy task, and Solomon spends the majority of his days digging the ground, pulling out rocks, and churning the earth until it resembles something like fertile farmland. The hard work, however, is a boon, and he feels comfortable here. True, his arms ache, and every day he’s discovering new ways for his back and legs to throb. But he is in the prime of health, his limbs growing stronger from the exercise and his skin acquiring a dusky tint from the constant sunlight. The sun bleaches his hair as well, the thick curls redder and blonder than they were in January. He’s let both his beard and hair grow long, partly out of a lack of caring, and partly — a nagging worry in the back of his skull — from the residual fear that someone saw him stealing the horse from Fort Yukon.

He slams the hoe into the ground, violently enough to jar his teeth, and he stops for a breather, wiping the sweat off his brow.

That is all behind him. There is no one here except the trees and the animals, and though both are keen observers, they jealously hoard their secrets. Solomon leaves the hoe in the ground as he goes to his porch for a drink of water. He glances up at the sky, in a vain attempt to determine the time of day. He hardly slept last night. He hardly sleeps any night. He tells himself that it is the sun and not his worries that keep chasing him from his bed.

He takes another swig of water, seating himself on the steps. He leans against the cabin and closes his eyes, savoring the breeze drying the sweat on his cheeks.

His eyes snap open when he hears a rustle.

He acts on instinct, sitting up and grabbing a rock to throw at whatever animal is sneaking into the garden. He freezes when he sees a lean gray body, pointed ears, and the curl of a mutt’s tail. The rock falls from his hand.

_Wolf._

The door behind him is open, and he keeps his eyes on the animal as he backs silently toward it. The wolf must be a juvenile. It’s so small that he can barely see the curve of its spine above the top of the fence. It must be young because what grown wolf would be bold enough to come this close to a man’s abode during the day.

(sometimes solomon thinks it’s not fear that keeps wolves away but some disdain they have for humans; a recognition that they are predators, but weak.)

He grabs his gun from where he left it propped just inside the cabin, already loaded and prepared. Solomon refuses to be caught unaware for the second time in one year. Lowering himself into a crouch, he creeps down the stairs. The pup starts to turn around the corner near Solomon. He levels the barrel of the rifle, hands steady even as his heart leaps into his throat.

But the pup stops, trotting toward the back of the garden. Its tail stands up on alert, and the longer Solomon looks at it, the less it looks like it belongs to a wolf.

He keeps the gun raised, the butt of the rifle firmly resting against his shoulder, as he circles wide around the garden. He glances at the surrounding woods, quickly assessing whether there were any other creatures looming. When he glances back, he cannot see where the pup has gone, and he bites out a curse. The pup hears him and spooks, hurrying from behind the woodpile with its tail tucked between its legs.

Solomon lowers his gun, watching as it runs to the edge of the clearing. It stops under the safe canopy of a drooping fir and peers back at him, one paw raised and at the ready.

“You’re no wolf,” Solomon mutters as he slings his rifle around his shoulder. “What’s a dog like you doing all the way out here?”

The dog is gray with pointed ears, but he has a shaggy coat, long hair around his muzzle and belly. Solomon crouches again, holding a hand out for the dog. Staring at him with frightened eyes, the dog dips his head, swaying as though plotting its escape. Solomon gives a low whistle, encouraging it to come.

“I won’t hurt you,” he promises.

The dog slowly wags its tail, still looking terribly unsure. When Solomon inches forward and a twig breaks beneath his foot, the wagging stops. Solomon coos again, but the dog is determined to stay put, ready to sprint as soon as Solomon proves too dangerous.

“I’ve got some jerky back in the cabin. You’d like that, wouldn’t you.” He keeps his voice soft, only speaking loud enough that the sound carries. The dog’s ears twitch, nervously watching as Solomon sits on his feet. All he can think to do is keep talking to the dog, regardless if it understands him or not. Solomon remembers his childhood home, bursting at the seams with children and how he used to sit up with the little ones after they had a nightmare. He would talk or sing to them quietly until they fell asleep against him. It’s not a poor tactic, be it for a child or animal. “Come here. I promise I won’t do nothing bad to you. Can’t speak for the horse, but she’s locked up in the barn and can’t get to you.” The dog lowers its head and cautiously approaches. “That’s it. Good, good. Come on.”

The dog stretches its neck and presses a wet nose against Solomon’s palm. A breathy laugh slips from him at the sensation, and the dog nearly flinches away.

“No, no, no, it’s all right, boy.”

He reaches for the dog’s ears, scratching at the fur where it’s matted along his scruff.

Again, he marvels out loud, “Where did you come from? Did a hunter lose you, or did you run all this way from Dawson?”

Upon closer inspection, he can see the dog’s ribs protruding through his gray fur, and Solomon runs his hand along its back, face tightening as he can feel every knob of its spine. The dog holds the same paw up, and Solomon realizes that it wasn’t poised to run but that the paw is hurt, one of its pads raw and bloody.

“You poor thing.” He rubs at its ear, and the dog leans into the touch, tail finally starting to wag regularly. “Let’s go inside and get you fed.”

⚒

“You’re developing quite the habit of picking up strays, aren’t you?” Bill winks at Solomon as the dog creeps around the property, giving the two of them a wide berth as he shows Bill around. “First a horse, now a dog.”

He and Maggie arrived earlier that day, their newborn child slung in a kerchief tied to Maggie’s front. They’re staying for several days, and he’s given them the bedroom while he set himself up in the loft, with a few blankets slung onto the unused cot.

“He found me,” Solomon says. “Not the other way around.”

They finish the _grand tour_ of the property in front of the cabin. All the doors and windows are open, letting the fresh summer air drift through. Solomon can see Maggie in the parlor, digging through one of the boxes for curtains she had sewn to replace the moth-eaten ones in the bedroom.

“It’s impressive what you’ve done in such a short time.” Bill sets his hands on his hips, nudging Solomon with an elbow. “I wouldn’t recognize it. Looks good.”

Solomon’s face grows warm from the praise, but he bites his tongue to stop himself from saying _thank you_. Oh, Bill wouldn’t let him hear the end of it.

They go inside for lunch, to a kitchen completely changed; every inch scrubbed, the counters and cabinets oiled. Solomon fixed any crooked doors and made new handles for every drawer. He built new chairs for the kitchen table, and each of the windows shine where once they had been covered in soot and dust. The loft is still cluttered, but Solomon took the time to air it out, knowing he was going to sleep there when the Heathers visited.

He left the tower alone. The rooms seem more personal to the hermit than the ground floor, and he didn’t feel comfortable changing things. He takes Bill up there after they eat, leaving Maggie downstairs where she comforts her fussing baby. The first room is as messy as Solomon originally found it. Perhaps the hermit had a system for his paints and brushes, but he took that knowledge with him to his grave.

“This is really something,” Bill says when they arrive at the second floor and he picks up a painting. “To think, he left all this behind, and no one cared.”

“Depressing,” Solomon says with a wry grin, “when you phrase it like that.”

Bill hums, transfixed by the same painting that had drawn Solomon, its many eyes peering from the wood. “But the truth. A cabin full of mismatched china, books, furniture, and paintings. His children took nothing.”

“Well, some of the furniture was in bad shape, and I cleared out plenty of broken dishes.”

Silence follows. Bill stares at the painting. Solomon turns from the window. He clears his throat. Bill stares at the painting.

“Bill?”

He flinches, a quick apology on his lips.

“Sorry, it’s just…”

Solomon grins hard enough that his teeth hurt. He wishes Bill would put the goddamn painting down. He should have burnt it himself before Bill came back.

“It’s just what?”

“It feels familiar, like something I’ve seen before…but forgot until now.”

Another long pause.

Solomon slaps his arm with an open palm and laughs when the contact makes Bill recoil enough to drop the painting.

“Didn’t take you for someone scared of bogeymen, Bill.”

“You know I’m not.” Bill puts the painting back with the others. He makes certain the image is turned toward the wall. “It just makes a man think.”

⚒

Night has returned, though the hours of darkness are short and resemble more a lengthy dusk than any true night. Maggie gently reminds Solomon that the true dark will be here before he knows it, and she says it with such earnest authority that he can’t be annoyed.

The three of them take advantage of the long evening and sit outside around a bonfire. Solomon carries out an old plush chair from the loft for Maggie, and she smiles her appreciation as she sits down. She cradles the baby — _Daniel_ , she had told Solomon with pride clear in her voice as she showed him the red-faced infant — against the skin of her chest, just below her collarbone. She hums quietly and tunelessly, lulling all three of them into a stupor.

Bill lights his pipe, and Solomon joins him after a good amount of ribbing.

“You saying only city men have vices?”

“No,” Solomon protests, as he stamps down tobacco into his own pipe. “And Dawson is awful small to be calling yourself a city man.”

The truth is that Solomon has been too busy during the day and too tired in the evenings to smoke. He can count on a single hand the amount of times he’s woken from a bad dream and would stumble into his kitchen and light his pipe with shaking hands, but the episodes have become fewer. The change of scenery and hard work has served him well, distracting him from his anxieties.

He hears a low whine and rustling of grass when the dog trots toward the light of the fire. He goes first to Solomon, shoving his snout against his arm. Bill clicks his tongue at him, inviting him over, but the dog stares at him with his head lowered, pressing hard against Solomon’s side.

“Nervous, is he?” Bill resumes smoking. He stretches his legs out, exhaling a thick plume of smoke that mixes with the sparks above the fire. “He got a name?”

Solomon has not thought about it, and he says as much.

Bill huffs, smiling around his pipe. “Gonna keep calling him _dog_?”

Maggie speaks up, “What about Wolf? Seems fitting, since he almost looks like one.”

The dog wags his tail slowly as he inches past the fire to Maggie’s chair and lies down beside it.

“I think he likes it,” Solomon says. “Wolf it is.”

Maggie shakes her head, smile soft. “He’s a sweet dog. I’m glad you’re not all alone out here.” Daniel whines in his sleep, and she rocks him gently, kissing the top of his head. “I just keep thinking about the man who died here. How awful it must have been to be so alone and not have anybody.”

Wolf raises his head and peers up at her, with cunning intelligence, ears perked as though listening to her every word.

“Aye,” Solomon mutters. “Man’s gotta have someone.”

⚒

The last day of the Heathers’ visit surrounds Bill building shelves in the kitchen while Solomon juggles several boiling pots on the stove. He follows Maggie’s instructions for how much salt to add, how long to boil. It is not Solomon’s first time around a kitchen, but his knowledge about preserving food is meager compared to Maggie’s. She is determined that he have a fully stocked cellar before winter.

“I would hate to see that beautiful garden go to waste,” she says.

“I'm sure I’d manage fine,” Solomon assures her, his face red from either embarrassment or steam. He can’t tell either way, and he hopes Maggie doesn’t notice how flustered he’s become. “Though I’m sorry for keeping you from your own home. Didn’t mean to take up so much of your time.”

She tuts. “We’ll be fine. We have plenty of neighbors in Dawson. You, on the other hand, need to be prepared.”

Solomon holds his breath, transferring the heavy pot from the stove to the table. “Still, I’d like to repay both of you. You’ve done more than enough getting me the property.”

Bill will hear nothing of it. “Pay us back when you can, Solomon. Worry about that next spring, all right?”

Maggie agrees with her husband, insisting that Solomon is as much family to her as her own brothers. “I’m glad that we can help you in any way.”

Regardless, Solomon feels heavy under the weight of the many gifts left by the Heathers, so when they pack up the following day, he slips a few jars of pickled vegetables into the cart, insisting that they were as much Maggie’s hard work as his own. Beaming, she hugs him before he helps her into the back of the cart, where she can rest comfortably under her quilts.

“You take care of yourself, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, Sol.” Bill gives him a firm handshake. “See you after winter.”

Solomon laughs. “See you next year.”


	3. Strays and Wolves

**Fall, 1899.**

Winter draws nearer with each morning frost, each leaf that spirals to the ground from increasingly barren trees, and each persistent twinge in Solomon’s knees and feet. Wolf has taken to sleeping at the foot of the bed, rousing when Solomon tosses and turns in the early hours. The added warmth from Wolf soothes Solomon’s legs, and he enjoys the hazy minutes after waking when Wolf stretches and wriggles closer until he can lick Solomon’s chin, receiving scratches in return; the two of them nestled in a warm cocoon of blankets and pillows until Solomon knows it’s time he tends to the barn animals.

Mornings are always the hardest. Solomon braces himself for the blast of cool air when he leaves the bed. He hurries dressing himself, yanking on woolen underwear and woolen socks, and stamping his feet as he moves to the parlor and rouses the coals in the fireplace. Wolf follows him, sitting on the rug beside him as he warms his hands over the fire.

“All right,” he says, to himself, to the cabin, to the dog. Solomon regrets that he’s become a man to talk aloud to himself, but he cannot stop. It’s a comfort to hear a human voice, even if it is his own. “We’ll see to breakfast after checking on Tess and Tulip. Maybe fry up some eggs, huh, boy? That sound good? We’ll boil some coffee, too. Can’t have too much, or it won’t last til April.”

Wolf always listens, so Solomon feels less foolish for speaking to him. Once his hands are warm, he rubs the dog’s head.

“Let’s go.”

He pulls on his coat and hat. He waits to pull on his gloves until he’s laced up both boots. He also lights a lantern, though he has walked the short distance from cabin to barn enough times that he could follow the path with his eyes closed.

As per his usual routine, Wolf sits outside the barn door, snuffling along the ground and keeping his keen eye on the clearing, as Solomon goes inside and hangs the lantern. Near the entrance, Cricket raises her head and eyes him reproachfully.

“Morning,” Solomon says to her. He knows better than to pet her nose. Last time he was stupid enough to do that, she nearly took a finger off with her teeth.

Tess and Tulip — the two milking cows — are far more accommodating to their new owner. He earned their affection with steady meals and the daily cleaning of their stalls, always taking a few extra minutes to rub their sides and tell them about his plans for the day. Tulip nudges her head against Solomon’s side when she decides that he has not given her enough attention yet. He laughs, holding her head up with both hands and rubbing her chin briskly.

“I have to work, love,” he tells her.

Though one look from her sad eyes makes him spend another minute rubbing circles on her head.

He likes mornings like these the most. There is nothing else pressing; the woodpile is plenty high and the garden tended. Most of the crops were a summer harvest, save the tall grass he’s growing for winter hay, and while he still hikes through the forest, laying traps or fishing at the creek, the short days encourage him to stay within a couple miles of the cabin. The woods become a different world in the dark, and he does not know its avenues well enough to retrace his steps after sunset.

He clears out the cows’ droppings and lays down fresh hay, topping off their water bucket. He does the same for Cricket’s stall, always a delicate dance to avoid her nips and her stomps. Wolf occasionally sticks his nose through the door and watches with curious eyes as Solomon moves around the barn, but once he is satisfied, he returns to his patrol outside. Solomon finds it endearing. Originally, he assumed it was remnants of the dog’s skittishness, but he has watched Wolf grow increasingly protective of his new home and family. When they hike to the fishing hole, Wolf always stays close to Solomon’s side, ears perked for any unusual noises, and at the farm, Wolf varies where he sleeps, one eye always half-opened, from the stoop to the garden to the patch of dirt beneath the coop’s ramp. The hens don’t mind them as they wander, plucking worms and grit from the ground. They fuss when Wolf will nudge them with his nose, leading them away from the fence, but even the hens have grown used to Wolf’s presence.

This morning, the two hens are still asleep, their beaks burrowed into their own feathers. He’ll let them wander the yard later, but for now, it’s warmer in the coop. He tries to not jostle them as he feels for eggs, but one of them raises her head to cluck at him, ruffling her neck feathers.

“Excuse me, madam,” Solomon mumbles, but once she clucks a few more times and deems her reprimand enough, she hides her face in her feathers again.

There aren’t many eggs this morning, but it will suffice for breakfast. He stashes them in his pocket before returning to the barn.

He always saves the milking for last. He enjoys the routine of it, and it gives him another opportunity to talk to sympathetic ears. He fetches the pails and a short stool, starting with Tess and then Tulip. He hums under his breath the whole time, patting their sides when he’s done. He pours the milk into a single bucket, and once he’s gathered the milk, eggs, and lantern, he whistles for Wolf. 

The pair of them return to the cabin, the trees around the clearing broken by bright beams of morning light. The very air itself glows golden, and the sky above them is beginning to turn into the radiant blue that marks a crisp autumn day.

Inside the cabin, warmth seeps from the hearth into every room. Solomon shucks his jacket with a sigh, depositing the eggs into a basket on the counter before he strains the milk into a glass jug. Wolf sits at his feet, waiting expectantly, but he shoos the dog.

“Breakfast will take a minute. You rest easy.”

Wolf’s tail wags, and he moves across the room to lie by the fire. Solomon sets the coffee to boil, and while he waits for it to start bubbling, he digs through the cabinets for the tin of lard. He’s careful to use only a small smear of it for the eggs, trying to make it last. He will be stuck with whatever is left, once the road to town becomes impassable under snow. But he allows himself a little indulgence every day. What with fresh milk, eggs, and a cellar full of preserves and pickled vegetables, Solomon eats like a king. His current diet is rich compared to the old bread and watered-down gruel he would stomach in the various mining camps.

“Can’t let that get to my head, or worse my belly,” he tells Wolf who politely listens, “It’ll have to last until spring.” He removes the coffee from the stove. “Doesn’t mean we can’t have a few nice meals every now and then.”

In the lard, the eggs fry to a crispy brown, and Wolf watches intently while he cuts a portion onto a plate for him. The dog is patient. Solomon can give him that much credit. He licks his lips as he waits, and once Solomon pats his head and sets the plate before him, Wolf buries his face into the food.

Solomon laughs at the sight. He leans on the counter and sets a much slower pace for himself as he eats. A beam of sunlight pierces the thick line of trees outside, lighting up one of the windows by the front door. The light bounces off the walls and ceiling of the cabin in a magnificent spectrum, and Solomon pauses eating long enough to marvel at the rainbow.

For the first time in over a week, he does not have a set agenda for the day.

“What should we do today? Walking, fishing, hunting? What do you think, boy?”

Wolf is too busy licking the remains of lard off the plate to pay Solomon any mind. He shakes his head with a smile, leaving his empty plate on the counter before settling himself with his coffee in a chair by the fire. Wolf sniffs every inch of his plate, shoving it across the floor until it bumps against the bottom of the cabinets, and only then does he deem his breakfast done. He joins Solomon by the fire, lying on the braided rug.

“We could set up some traps,” Solomon thinks out loud after a sip of coffee. He props his feet by the grate, where the fire warms his toes through his socks until it is almost too hot to bear. “We’ll need fresh meat before the thick of winter, won’t we?”

Despite the cheerful sunlight outside, the woods are eerily silent, every animal busy finding and preparing their haven for the winter. The silence seeps into the cracks of the cabin, broken only by the creak of Solomon’s chair and the crackle of the fire.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, draining the last of his coffee. “We’ll do that.”

⚒

He brings his rifle for safety more than hunting. Wolf nimbly runs through the woods, as soundless as a deer. Solomon lets him go. He figures the woods are as much home to the dog as the cabin, and even when Wolf disappears for minutes at a time, he always returns with bright eyes and a wagging tail. Currently, they are near the creek, and Solomon kneels beside the water, watching as a shoal of tiny minnows scatter from his shadow. He scoops a handful of the water and drinks from it, enjoying the earthen taste on his tongue. Looking around, he scouts the underbrush for a decent place to lay a snare. He hopes for rabbit, though he wouldn’t mind a fox or weasel. Furs are as treasured as food, and Solomon knows better than to snub whatever the wilderness decides to give him. 

He hides a few small snares by the rocks and underbrush. He hears a rustle behind him. He readies his rifle, aiming toward the noise. He holds his breath until he sees the familiar shaggy head darting between the trees, and he releases a long sigh.

Wolf comes straight to him, bumping his head against Solomon’s chest. Sticks and brambles cling to his coat, and Solomon tugs them off.

“One of these days,” he quietly complains, “I won’t know it’s you coming, you damn mutt.”

Wolf wags his tail and inclines his head, listening with that queer intelligence that makes Solomon wonder how much the dog truly understands him.

He clarifies, “I don’t _want_ to shoot you, but it’s bound to happen what with you running as fast as you can back to me.”

When he stands, Wolf jumps back, front paws extended and rump in the air. He tosses his head and barks before running a few feet away and stopping.

“You want me to follow?”

Wolf barks again and runs without waiting. Solomon sighs, slinging the rifle across his back. He has to jog to keep up with Wolf, and a couple times, he nearly loses his footing on thick, protruding roots. He reaches the edge of a clearing by the creek where the water widens into a proper river. He assumes the currents converge with the Yukon, somewhere North of there, but his maps are simple, and his feet can only take him so far on his daily walks.

Wolf is pawing the ground upriver of him, and once Solomon is closer, he sees what has the dog in such a frenzy: droppings, much bigger than the pellets of a fox or rabbit. Solomon kneels beside it. He pokes it with a stick, trying to determine if there is any undigested food that can provide him a clue to what animal this belongs. It may be something large, perhaps a caribou or moose. Both would be excellent sources of meat for the winter, but Solomon knows better than to think he can trap something as enormous as a moose. Another part of him realizes that the droppings could belong to another equally dangerous predator; bears or—

He finds bits of gristle and bone in the pile, and he leans back. Wolf sits beside him, eyeing him expectantly. Solomon tosses aside the stick with a grunt and thinks.

Wolves.

Goddamn wolves.

⚒

He lays one trap near the mouth of the widening river. He doesn’t have enough cord for more, and he hardly expects anything larger than a mouse to get trapped there. Bears will be preparing for the winter, and wolves are too smart to get their heads or paws caught in the loop. At least, the older ones are.

The fleeting daylight disappears beyond the horizon, briefly painting the snowy peaks in the distance a vivid vermilion before pitching the valley into shadow. There’s enough light that Solomon can pick his way through the woods and find his usual paths. The trail between the creek and the cabin is worn from the many times he’s walked it. The familiarity puts him at ease and diminishes some of the earlier anxiety he felt surrounding the shit pile. If any creature wants to kill him here, he can find some comfort in knowing that it wouldn’t be personal. It’s a far cry from the danger he navigated in the mining camps, in boomtowns, or in Cornelius’s company.

He spends the rest of the evening in the safety of his cabin, venturing out only to tend to the animals, topping their food, milking the cows and — most important — checking that the barn and coop are equally secure. All possible windows and doors are shut tight, and the short corridor connecting barn to coop is solid. He pokes his head into the coop itself, shining his light at the chickens. Both hens are awake, but they glance at him only momentarily before settling deeper into their nests.

Solomon goes outside afterward, to check the wire fencing around the coop. Some of the wires on the fence have sprung free, and Solomon twists them together around the wooden post. Frowning, he shines his light over the fenced yard, checking for any other breakage, any paw prints, tufts of fur. With the night comes a profound darkness, and his lantern casts a circle of light that just grazes the edge of the trees. The branches swell with a slow, cold breeze as though the trees themselves were watching him. Solomon starts to walk toward the perimeter of the fence, closer to the woods, but the trees lean like arms extending ready to snatch any creature foolish enough to go near.

He grits his teeth and heads back to the cabin instead.

He makes a note to nail some more boards to the thinner portions of the coop’s wall, more security to help him sleep at night. For now, he will have to rest easy that no animals besides his own have been bold enough to visit his clearing.

(he hopes.)

Not an hour later, he has a meal resting in his belly, and he nods off before the fire, lulled by the snores puffing out of Wolf from where he sleeps on the floor. Solomon sets aside the book he had been indifferently reading — one of the dozen books he brought with him to the cabin. The hermit had a collection of about ten books himself, but Solomon has left them where they lie stacked horizontally toward the bottom. They’ll be of more interest once he’s snowed in, once he’s read through the other books twice over, once he’s stir crazy enough that he crawls up the sides of the walls and starts bawling at the darkness outside.

He stands with a stretch, nudging Wolf awake with the tip of his toe. Wolf huffs at him, reluctant to leave his spot by the fire.

Solomon grins. “Suit yourself.”

He knows that Wolf will join him when the parlor and kitchen grow too cold, after the fire has died down, but for now, the bed is his alone. He strips down and hurries under the covers, rubbing his feet against the blankets until they start to feel warm beneath his toes. After a long day of walking and working, sleep comes quickly to him, and he sleeps so deeply that he does not hear Wolf pad into the room later, nor does he wake when Wolf lifts his head from the quilt, nor does he wake from his dead sleep when Wolf flattens both ears and whines lowly while the wind grows stronger outside, rushing past the cabin, rattling the windows, ripping old bark off the edges of the roof.

The wind howls and howls and howls. Wolf does not rest easy, but Solomon sleeps through it all.

⚒

The days blend together, each one shorter than the last. The chores are monotonous, but Solomon finds comfort in how reliable his daily routine has become. On the mornings where he finds himself with naught to do — food already prepped, animals checked, stalls cleaned; he cannot help but panic somewhat. Days like these are becoming more frequent, and while the leisure used to be nice, Solomon now finds himself staring at the room around him, his hands fidgeting at his side, his breath coming faster.

The panic will pass, and he will sit on the hearth and hang his head, laughing at himself.

“You must think I’m some fool,” he says to Wolf who turns his head thoughtfully to him. “ I forget where I am, and I worry there’s something I need to do that I’m _not_ doing.”

He turns his hands up toward the ceiling, staring at the lines crisscrossing the palm, the various callouses, some old, some new. He furls his hands shut.

“I have to learn how to relax. Don’t I, boy?”

For today, he hauls himself to his feet, fetching his coat and his boots. He grabs his rifle and his fishing gear. Wolf eagerly paws at the door, knowing what’s to come. It’s noon, and the sun is high, though at a sharp enough angle to remind him that night will be here before he knows it. He pats Wolf’s head and sets off toward his usual path, past the vegetable garden, past the barn, and into the thick line of trees. Wolf runs far ahead of him, but Solomon thinks nothing of it as he reaches the creek. Activity in the water is sparse, so he doubts he will catch much this afternoon. He sets up his rod, casting the lure into the water and finds himself a flat space to sit on. He leans back against a tree trunk, stretching his feet before him and watching the sun reflect off the surface of the water.

No, he won’t catch anything today, but he will enjoy what few days of fishing he has left before any attempt to get to the water involves cutting through a layer of ice.

The sun filtering through the trees is pleasant on his face with its lingering traces of summer. He crosses his arms on his chest and tips his hat forward. He leaves the rod propped against his leg where he will feel it tug, but otherwise, it is not long before he starts to doze, lulled by the whisper of the creek’s current and the chirping of birds overhead.

He jolts awake when he hears Wolf wildly barking, interspersed with growling. Solomon’s chin jerks up, and his hat slides off his head as he grabs his rifle and stands. It’s later than he thought. The sun has skirted past the peak of a mountain, and the woods burn with the glow of twilight.

He whistles for Wolf, keeping the butt of the rifle balanced on his shoulder as he scans the trees around him. Wolf is higher up the hill, stumbling as he runs over rocks and around trees. He’s holding something in his mouth, and his ears are flat, tail tucked. Solomon keeps a close eye on the path behind him, to be sure that no animal is pursuing, or worse, attacking. He lowers his gun once Wolf is near, and he takes the torn rope from Wolf’s mouth. Blood sticks to the fibers, and the end is frayed as though cut by something dull. Tufts of white and gray fur stick to where the blood has congealed. Solomon grimaces as he throws the rope aside.

He packs up quickly, and the two of them return to the cabin in record time. Solomon plans to check the rest of his traps the following day. The sight of that rope with blood and fur caked on it settles heavily on Solomon like a wet blanket, and as much as he wants to catch some fresh game, he almost hopes that the snares will all be empty.

⚒

October comes, and the woods feel less like home. Solomon hikes daily, checking on traps and bringing home the limp bodies of rabbits to skin and to cook. Fishing is rare, and foxes are harder to trap. Solomon takes his rifle with him every time he ventures into the woods, and thankfully, ever since Wolf found the bloody rope, he doesn’t stray far during their hikes. He still follows his nose and ears, but he stays within Solomon’s sight. Most of the trees this far North are thick-ribbed firs and towering pines. There is little changing of the leaves, and the woods remain dense and foreboding. Even at the height of day, there are corners of the woods that remain pitch black.

Solomon never turns his back to these pockets of darkness. He feels eyes on him at all times. He tells himself that it’s his imagination, to not be so damn skittish. But every twig that cracks has him spinning with rifle raised. There are times where his eyes fool him, and he imagines that there are pale, red-eyed creatures that gnash and snarl at him just out of sight, and every time he catches a glimpse of them, they retreat back into the darkness, their skeletal hands clutching at their knives carved from bone and rock.

His fears are childish. He knows that, but he keeps his trips to the woods shorter, regardless. Today is the farthest he has hiked all week, and as he retrieves another rabbit from one of his snares, he looks up in time to see a bull moose through a gap in the trees. He crouches low to the ground, heart pounding.

Solomon levels his gun, training his sights on the massive creature. He knows the rifle can’t shoot that far, even with a target as large as the bull, but he doesn’t dare creep closer for fear of alerting the moose to his presence. Instead, he watches as the moose rips some plant from the ground, lifting its head and chewing slowly. Its crown of antlers knocks into branches that must be at least twelve feet from the ground, and it shakes the branches off before sauntering into one of the dreaded, dark corners of the woods.

A ragged sigh punches from Solomon. He sags against a tree, letting his rifle rest on top of his thighs.

He doesn’t know which is worst: his newfound fear of the dark, the ‘wolves’ haunting his dreams and playing tricks on his eyes and ears, or that the forest is teeming with animals as real and outlandish as the moose.

He decides to stay closer to the cabin in the future.

Hunting has been successful thus far, and he will continue as much as the winter months allow.

He will stay closer to the cabin.

This, he repeats again and again in his head as he travels the well-worn path back to his property, Wolf trotting a few paces behind him. The sun sets before he reaches home, but he grits his teeth, ignoring the imagined moans and sighs as the trees swell like water around him, or flinching when his skin twitches from spectral fingers pinching and plucking at his hat and every seam of his coat.

Next time, he will stay closer to the cabin.

For now, he will not run.

⚒

Clouds the color of soot hang heavy over the trees, near enough that Solomon might reach up and pluck one from the sky. The clouds suck all color from the air, and everything takes on a sickly pale tint. The air is sharp, the inside of his nostrils stinging from how dreadfully dry and cold the front is.

Snow, he knows in his gut. The first storm of many.

He has started covering his face with a muffler, even for the short walks to the barn and back. His animals are restless, and he gives them twice as much hay, twice as much attention. After bedding down the chickens, he spends an extra hour consoling both Tess and Tulip. The more he talks to them, filling their ears with songs and childhood stories, the less they toss their heads with their eyes roving wildly around the barn. He gives them extra water, noting that he will need to break the ice for them once it’s cold enough for the water to freeze. He fills their feed buckets to overflowing, an indulgence he knows he can’t maintain forever. His stores are limited.

“Winter isn’t forever,” he says, a reminder more for himself than the cows, “we’ll just have to be patient. Keep our wits about ourselves.”

He goes to Cricket’s stall next, and she faces him long enough that he sees the deliberate turn of her head when she ignores him. Solomon is used to her tantrums by now. He pats her flank, and her tail flicks. She stays resolutely turned away the entire time he works, and he doesn’t talk to her. He knows better than that. The last thing he wants is to give the horse reason enough to bite or kick him.

Wolf has fallen asleep by the wall, curled into a tight ball to keep warm. Solomon almost feels bad for waking him, but he bends down to rub between Wolf’s ears until the dog squints unhappily at him. Solomon pats his thigh, giving a click of his tongue and a _come on_ , before he pulls his muffler over his nose and fetches the lantern. He stands by the door for several seconds, preparing himself for the fast walk back to the cabin.

The promise of a warm fire spurs him forward. He reckons that is where he’ll spend the remainder of his evening. As his supper cooks on the stove, he draws the curtains tight over each window. He checks that the door is sealed tight, and he secures a heavy tarp over the trap door leading to the loft. The rooms above store cold more effectively than an icebox, and Solomon does not plan to spend much time in either the loft or tower because of it.

He pours the soup into a bowl and carries his meal to the hearth. The table he and Bill carpentered collects dust a few feet away. Solomon prefers the upholstered chair near the fire. The soup is hot enough that the first bite burns the roof of his mouth, and he hastily spits it back out. He sighs and leaves it on the side table to cool, standing to get some water for his mouth. He stops by one of the windows, parting the curtains with a finger so he can look outside. The light is gone, and with neither stars nor snow, the darkness is dense. He closes the curtain and heads back to his chair.

While he waits for the soup to cool, he picks up the abandoned volume of poetry he had been half-reading the past week. Already not much of a reader, Solomon finds the poems odd. He’s used to riddles, limericks, the rhythmic sonnets of love stories. The book was a gift from Cornelius — one that Solomon had forgotten until he found the book shoved under a wrinkled shirt at the bottom of his pack. The poetry itself rambles, a clump of dry observations and factual statements that, at least in Solomon’s mind, seems to serve no purpose other than to aggravate its reader.

Still, the book is better than nothing. He keeps it open on his knee as he eats his supper.

He finishes the soup with a swipe of bread to wipe up the excess, and when a loud gust of wind rattles the windows and shakes the trees outside, he flinches enough that he nearly drops the bowl onto the floor. With a whine, Wolf picks himself up and lies underneath Solomon’s feet. He rubs his socked foot against Wolf’s flank, glancing at the curtained window with some unease.

“It’s all right, boy. Just the wind.”

He sets the bowl aside to clean later, and propping his feet onto the warm hearth, he resumes reading.

He reads a line, looks at the window, reads the same line, sighs and lays the book on his lap, looks at the window, reads the next line, looks at the window, rereads the last line, turns the page, looks at the window when the wind picks up, winces when a branch thumps the side of the cabin, tries to read but loses the desire, puts the book on the table, settles deeper into his chair, and stares at the fire.

The remainder of the evening goes by as though he were in a trance.

He must have cleaned up supper at some point, but he couldn’t say exactly when. He hardly remembers going to the bedroom or dressing for bed. He closes his eyes, and the night is over. He wakes, tucked neatly under the quilts. Wolf lies on his feet. He dresses, bouncing on the balls of his feet to get his blood flowing, and he looks out the window from the bedroom. It is not light outside yet, but a thick blanket of snow coats every structure, every rock, every tree. Large, fat flakes continue to fall from the sky. Solomon’s breath fogs up the glass, and he wipes away the condensation, seeing the ice crystals cling to the window.

The wind whistles through his strip of valley, grabbing handfuls of snow and tossing them into the air, stripping the tree branches of their powdered wig only for more snowflakes to immediately take their place.

Solomon switches rooms, and he keeps the window by the fireplace open where he can watch the snow pile higher and higher.

⚒

The strangest part of the storm is how silent it is. The snow itself is quiet as a mouse, and were it not for the distant howling of the wind or the creak of timber as snow piled onto the roof, Solomon might believe it perfectly peaceful outside.

He risks going in the storm long enough to dig a path between the cabin and the barn. He enters the barn to break the ice in the water buckets, soothing the distressed animals as well, but he returns to the haven of his hearth as quickly as he can. Once the storm eases, he ventures outside again. It is past noon, during the longest minutes of daylight. The sun, however, hides behind a thick layer of clouds. Both sky and ground blends into a large canvas of cold, icy gray.

The path he dug earlier has disappeared under fresh snow, but it is fine as powder where he scoops a few handfuls off the stoop. It shouldn’t be too difficult to clear the path again. He fetches the shovel and digs out the fresh snow, the task less daunting than it had been in the morning. The wind has settled down, replaced by a deadly calm. The snow sucks all sound from the air. The only noise Solomon can hear is his puffing breaths and the scrape of his shovel. The trees seem to sleep after the riotous energy of the storm, and Solomon moves carefully; light steps, deep breaths, no whistling or humming. The woods demand an air of reverence that Solomon has never given to anyone in his entire life, not even the times he would find himself outside a house of God.

He feels less alone in the sanctity of snow. There are eyes and ears and a deep-rooted song humming in the crusts of the earth, vibrating through rock and dirt and wood until it shakes the tips of the trees and rumbles the foundations of every mountain. There is God here, perhaps not the God Solomon has known in the past, but the presence is here nonetheless. While it is not quite a comfort, perhaps, it provides Solomon with a sense of awe.

He works until his feet and hands are numb. He puts the shovel away in the barn, making one more round to his flock before returning to the cabin. He resumes his spot by the fire. His body is tired, and he fears that sleep will not fulfill him. His stomach cries for food, but cooking would break the quiet that has settled over his corner of the valley.

He settles onto his knees before the hearth and rouses the coals in complete silence. Wolf tilts his head at him but seems to understand. Once the fire is burning, Wolf lies down on the rug, and Solomon returns to his chair. He’s too tired to read, too tired to speak, and with only the crackling of flames and the low groan of the cabin’s ancient wood, he passes the evening in silence.

With the night comes more snow, and Solomon retires early.

⚒

When he wakes, it is with a piercing pain in his head and a bursting bladder. It is still nighttime, and the storm seems to have returned, as Solomon can hear and feel a powerful wind buffeting against the sides of the cabin. He clambers out of the bed, hissing when his feet hit the floor, and he yanks out the chamber pot from beneath the bed. Once he’s relieved himself, his mind clears enough that he notices light from the crack between the curtains. It is oddly bright, shimmering like spools of silver thread. He peeks outside and sees a full moon looming over the tops of the trees like an immense, unblinking eye. The woods are equally illuminated under the harsh glow, every dip and rise of the landscape as clear as day. The light also brightens the bedroom, and Solomon notices for the first time that Wolf is gone.

He stares uncomprehendingly for a second before he clicks his tongue, letting out a low whistle and calling the dog’s name.

No answer but the wind.

He drops to a knee and searches underneath the bed, but there is nothing. The door to the main room is open. He dresses but discovers the kitchen and parlor as empty as the bedroom. The curtains are open on the window by the fireplace, allowing moonlight to spill across the floor. The furniture cast jagged, misshapen shadows across along the walls. But even in the strange and unfamiliar pockets of darkness, Solomon sees no sign of Wolf.

The door sways several inches from its frame, and a chill scampers through the gap and across the floor. Solomon shivers when it hits him, his head whipping toward the door. It is open. Enough to let in the frigid air and some flurries of snow; enough to let a whimsical dog run free. He races to the door, flinging it open. He sees paw prints traveling down the steps into the snow and across the clearing where they disappear into the woods.

Solomon backtracks long enough to grab his hat, coat, and muffler — almost forgets his gun, but he stumbles to the shelf with one arm in his coat and the rest slapping against his legs. He laces his boots enough to keep them on, and even in his haste, he can feel his feet slipping inside of them as he races out the front door, following Wolf’s trail.

He yells Wolf’s name, his voice cracking, still rough with sleep. He hears barking in the distance behind the cabin. Vicious snarls mirror Wolf’s cries, and Solomon feels lightheaded at the sound, feeling cold from far more than the snow. A chorus of howls follows.

“Goddamn, stupid mutt! Why the _hell_ did you go out at night — why did you — “

Solomon’s blood pulses in his ears as he digs through the snow. He loses sight of Wolf’s tracks and frantically spins himself in circles until he sees another mess of prints near the base of a tree. His legs ache, muscles straining, but every step he takes is haggard and slow. He’s breathing hard by the time he crests the hill. The cabin disappears from sight behind him. On all sides, the trees loom. The trees watch. The moon lights his way, and he presses forward even when his legs begin to cramp, every gulp of air a knife to his lungs.

He hears more snarling, and he aims his rifle blindly into black trees around him.

He whistles for Wolf. He holds his breath and listens. He lets out a sigh of relief when Wolf barks. The howls have ceased, and Solomon hopes that the pack have headed far from here, chasing the moon, and that his dog has not landed himself in a world of trouble. He spots Wolf, though from this distance he looks like nothing more than a gangly dark mass lurching through the loose snow. Solomon lowers his rifle and calls for the dog. Wolf lifts his head, one paw up, ears perked. He barks and immediately turns back the way he came, disappearing among the trees.

“Son of a—”

Solomon flings his rifle over his shoulder and crawls up the embankment on his hands and knees. The hill is steep enough on its own, but the snow makes it treacherous.

He reaches the top when a loose rock under the snow shifts beneath his foot, and he lunges forward, his only anchor to the hillside a thin fir branch.

“Wolf!” he bellows, panting as he regains his footing, “you better be _dying_ , you goddamn piece of—”

Wolf barks again, followed by a litany of whines. _Jesus_ , all right, he hauls himself forward, and when the ground levels out, he sees why Wolf is fussing.

Solomon stares, unbelieving. The rifle slips down his shoulder, and he keeps staring.

In one of his old snares, an unconscious man lies with his wrist caught. His shirtsleeves are in tatters. His feet are bare. The moonlight glows around him, framing his colorless figure, punctuated only by the dark hair obscuring his face and the pool of blood he lies in.

“Goddamn. Goddamn.” Solomon rushes forward, “Goddamn. Goddamn—”

Wolf whines beside him, but otherwise, they are alone; man, man, moon, and dog.

⚒

Solomon’s back pinches from where he has the man slung over his shoulders. He is moving as quickly as he can through the snow, and more than once, he nearly drops the stranger onto the ground. Minutes feel like hours, and by the time he reaches his door and places the man on the floor, his hands are shaking. He strikes the flint several times before he succeeds in summoning a spark. He holds his hands up to the meager flame. He hisses in pain as he unfurls and stretches his numb fingers. The frost in his beard melts, dripping onto the floor. He wipes away some of the moisture with his coat sleeve, wincing when he catches on the cracked skin of his lips. His hands burn, but Solomon keeps them there until they thaw, periodically rubbing them together to hurry the process.

Once sensation has returned to his fingers, Solomon looks at the stranger where he lies on the rug. The light of the fire is kinder to the man’s features than the moon had been, but his skin has a pallor of death about it. Solomon checks his breathing — shallow — and his pulse — erratic — and upon closer examination, he realizes that his shirt is clinging to him only by his braces and congealed blood. The cotton is torn to ribbons. Solomon hooks his hands under the man’s armpits and pulls him closer to the fire. He hurries to the bedroom, grabbing blankets from the chest. He dumps them on the floor at the man’s feet, immediately heading to the kitchen where he finds a large pot for melting ice. He hauls a couple buckets from the fresh snow on the porch, and as he’s lighting the stove, he looks over his shoulder to see Wolf sitting by the man, nudging his arm with his snout.

Wolf can’t hurt him, Solomon figures, no more than he’s already hurt. Hell, if it weren’t for Wolf, the man would be dead. Solomon leaves them be, dumping snow into the pot.

Solomon returns to the man with scissors to cut away the shirt. Most of the man’s wounds are along his abdomen and side. They look black in the firelight, and Solomon hopes with bile in his throat that they aren’t deep. He’ll stitch them as best he can, but beyond darning his socks and fixing the buttons on his shirt, Solomon knows he has no talent with a needle.

Once the water is hot, Solomon finds some old linens that he cuts into strips. He cleans the blood from the man’s body, gingerly prodding each cut as he goes. The worst one carves into his side, just below the ribs. With a grimace, Solomon pulls on the edge of the wound, trying to determine how deep it is. The cut doesn’t appear to have reached bone or organ. Solomon’s no doctor, but he figures that so long as guts aren’t spilling onto the floor, the cut can’t be too bad. One of the cuts begins to bleed, and Solomon pinches the pieces of skin together with a curse. He presses one of the bloody rags hard against his side and leaves it as he retrieves his sewing kit from the bedroom.

He drops to his knees beside the man with a loud thud. He winces, but the man slumbers on. Paranoia grips Solomon, and he checks his breathing and pulse again. The man lives on, but Solomon feels time passing him by.

He threads the needle, knotting the dangling ends together before he grabs a small piece of kindling from the fire. He holds the flame under the needle until he deems it ready. He tosses the wood back into the fire, and with a curse and a prayer, he removes the cloth from the man’s side and gets to work. The skin blooms red where he has to prick it with the needle, and for the first time, an involuntary noise slips from the man. Solomon looks up to see the man’s lips part. His brow is pinched, and his shallow pants are uneven. His head tips to the side, face turned toward the fire.

Wolf whimpers and presses himself against the man’s uninjured side. Solomon mutters an apology and keeps sewing. As much as he wants to hurry and be done, the thread is thin, and he has to double back more than once to get the sutures tight. When the largest gash is closed, Solomon checks the others. He decides that none are serious enough for stitches, and so long as he keeps them clean, they should heal fine. He takes strips of cloth and wraps them around the man’s belly and chest, cinching them tight. A pained groan leaves the man, and his eyes flutter open, gazing at the ceiling with a blank, unfocused stare. Solomon ties the bandage and leans over the man, cupping his face.

“Hey, hey,” he murmurs, patting the man’s cheek, but his eyes slide shut again, head lolling. Solomon runs his hands through the man’s hair, checking if there are any bumps or cuts hidden along his skull. He finds none, and his hands pull away clean.

He examines the man’s face for the first time, and Solomon is struck by how young he looks. Not a child, no not that young, but he certainly looks nothing like the trappers and grizzled prospectors that Solomon rubbed shoulders with along the Yukon. His features are delicate — a thin nose, finely shaped mouth, long lashes, and a well-groomed beard. Perhaps the man was new to Alaska, an investor looking for land or ill-advised adventure and got lost along the way. Wouldn’t be the first tragic story Solomon has heard here.

He lays the man’s head back onto the floor before he moves down his body. There is a shallow cut on one of his feet that Solomon dabs with water, but what concerns him more are the toes. They are distressingly pale, as white as the fresh snow outside. Solomon holds both feet in his lap, angling himself toward the fire. He tries to rub some warmth back into them. He might have been able to stitch the man up, but he knows nothing about removing frostbitten toes and fingers. The feet remain cold, but he’s relieved to see some color returning along the arch. He sets the feet aside and continues his search for unseen wounds. He undoes the man’s belt — pausing when he notices the decorative design in the leather and the quality of the buckle, realizing that this man must have come from _money_ — and slides his trousers down his hips. There is no sign of fresh blood on either trouser leg or underwear, other than what seeped from the wounds along his belly. Still, Solomon strips him completely and uses the remainder of the hot water to wipe the man’s limbs down, cleaning and warming him all the same.

Once he’s done, he grabs the blankets and drapes them over the man, tucking the corners around his feet and arms.

He adds more wood to the fire, thinking for a moment.

“He’s too damn cold,” he says. Wolf lifts his head to listen. “He’ll need to be close to the fire. I can stay with him, keep the fire going.” Wolf pushes his nose against Solomon’s hand, licking his knuckles. Solomon scratches his head in return. “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll keep the fire going.”

Exhaustion creeps up on him, however, and Solomon feels his eyes and head grow heavy. He stamps one foot to keep himself awake. The man sighs, frowning. His head tosses, and he starts to fuss with the blankets, blindly pushing them.

“Stop that, hey, stop.”

Kneeling beside him, Solomon pins the man’s shoulders, and as the man thrashes, he realizes that he’s still asleep, battling some unseen creature in his dreams.

His eyes move frantically under his eyelids, but after another groan, he goes limp under Solomon’s hands. His chest heaves, and Solomon tries to soothe away the nightmares by rubbing his shoulder and smoothing his hair from his face. After a few seconds, the man’s breathing calms, and his face — pinched but with less of a frown — turns into Solomon’s hand. Even by the fire, his skin remains frightfully cold.

Solomon makes a snap decision before he can talk himself out of it. He strips off his coat, shirt, trousers, socks, and underwear. The sweat on his back cools rapidly in the chilly room, and he adds a couple more logs onto the grate joining the man under the blankets. He hisses when their skin makes contact. The stranger feels as cold as the air outside, and Solomon sucks a breath through his teeth when he presses as much of himself against the man as he can. Wolf hovers nearby but keeps his distance while Solomon settles them closer to the fire. He is grateful that the man sleeps, now that their faces are only inches away. He swallows and forces his gaze from the man’s face. He wraps his arms around the man’s midsection, pressing their bare chests and legs firmly together.

He does not know if he will sleep, since he must keep watch over the fire and the man, but he allows himself a moment of respite, closing his eyes and resting his forehead against the stranger’s hair. As he floats between wakefulness and sleep, he wonders how long the snow will remain outside, or if this storm marks the end of autumn. Either way, the long dark is coming, and it is cold. The road to town will be impassable until spring.

It will be November in a few days.

Winter is as good as come.


	4. Ned

**Winter, 1899.**

The man sleeps for several days. He wakes in intervals, his limbs slow and his eyelids heavy. During these brief windows, Solomon helps him eat spoonfuls of broth and relieve himself in the chamber pot before he sleeps again, impossible to wake for hours. The bedroom is all but forgotten as Solomon and the stranger nest by the fire. Solomon fears moving him, worried he might aggravate his wounds. Even worse, he fears touching him.

(the first morning he woke against the man, his skin was hot as a furnace where their limbs remained tangled. the man slept peacefully, all trouble struck from his face, and solomon’s skin prickled with pleasure where bare leg, arm, and belly touched. with mounting horror, solomon realized that he was hard. he drew back, leaving the stranger alone in the blankets as he fetched clothing and warm water, begging his lonely body to control itself, dismayed that he was so starved of companionship that the first night spent alongside another body was all that would ignite those long-dormant desires.)

Hesitant to abandon the stranger, Solomon only leaves the cabin to tend to the animals. Wolf stays behind, keeping watch over the man as he sleeps. Solomon pulls on his coat and hat, looking back in time to see the dog bow his head and brush his nose against the man’s forehead. Wolf huffs, his breath disturbing the man’s hair, but the man remains asleep. Wolf looks up at Solomon then, something deeply sad in his eyes. Solomon gives him a nod, that sweet dog with a big heart.

“He’ll be fine, boy,” he says, hoping that his promise will come true. He’ll be damned if he has to wake alongside a dead man again. “Just you wait and see.”

Outside, the landscape is deceptively tranquil with a massive sky of blue overhead, the horizon clear enough that Solomon can see the looming mountains beyond the trees. Not even a light breeze stirs the air today, and Solomon cannot help but wonder as he stomps to the barn if every great storm is followed by a period of terrible, disorienting peace. As he walks to the barn in his carved-out path, he peers through the trees at the gap where he knows the road to Dawson lies unseen. The snow is smooth, broken by some fallen branches and the meandering tracks of birds and animals. Deeper in the woods, Solomon sees where a tree has fallen across the gap, further cutting him off from the road. The sight makes him uneasy, but the wood will make for good fuel. He’ll hike to it later to chop off the branches and drag the trunk to the cabin.

When he opens the barn door, both cows bellow in unison. He laughs as he fastens the latch behind him and hangs the lantern.

“Ladies, I know you’ve missed me since yesterday, but you’ll have to be patient.”

The barn itself has weathered the storm just fine, no noticeable gaps in the roof or walls. Solomon still eyes every line of chinking as he climbs to the loft for more hay. A frozen animal would be as devastating to him as a dead man, perhaps more. He grabs a new bale by the twining and tosses it to the ground before descending the ladder with practiced ease, skipping the last two rungs. His previous exhaustion has disguised itself as an uncommon burst of adrenaline; one that makes his heart beat with panicked energy as he realizes that he is truly isolated, no company except Wolf, (the stranger), and his animals.

No Bill or Maggie; they’re settling for a cozy winter in Dawson. No Cornelius or Manson; who can say where they escaped to; farther West, maybe even far enough to see the ocean. Poor Gibson is likely rotting in a shallow grave outside Fort Yukon. And here’s Solomon hauling hay for barn animals at a remote cabin with a stray dog and a naked, half-dead stranger by his hearth.

Solomon chuckles to himself from the strangeness of it all. Cricket eyes him dubiously, turning away with a snort when he pats her side. His hand lingers too long, and he yanks his hand away from her nipping teeth just in time. He keeps chuckling to himself, mixed with shaky sighs that veer awfully close to sobs, and Solomon thinks he might _be_ crying by the time he reaches Tess and Tulip. The sweet cows are more sympathetic to his plight, and as he tops their feed bucket, Tess rubs her face against him, making a low crooning sound as though she were his mother and he a wailing calf. He hugs her neck, burying his wet eyes against her side. Tulip also nudges him, but when he feels her tongue searching his hand, he pulls away with a huff.

“Oh, I see how it is,” he says with a grin, his voice shaking; “You only love me for food.”

Tulip blinks at him, all innocent confusion, and he digs out some feed for her to eat from his hand.

“Can’t say no to a face like that.” He gives a handful to Tess as well. “Can’t say no to either of you.”

He wipes down their udders, milking them with practiced ease, and by the time he moves on toward the coop, Tess and Tulip stand sleepy-eyed in their stall. The hens are restless, which he cannot fault, but he is antsy to return to the cabin. Wasting no time, he quickly feeds them and searches for eggs. The hen nearest to him pecks at his hand when he crowds her. When he murmurs an apology, she clucks and turns her face back into her feathers. The second hen does the same when he shuts the coop as though she were telling him it was too damn cold to pester them like this. Solomon’s inclined to agree.

He retraces his steps back through the barn, patting both cows’ heads on his way. He salutes Cricket, feeling foolish since she won’t even look at him, and with the pail slung over one arm and lantern in the other, he releases a big gust of air and starts the walk back to the cabin. He jogs up the porch steps, stamping his feet to shake the snow off his boots, and he flings the door open and closed as fast as he can to keep the cold air out.

He strips his coat and hat, hanging them both on hooks by the door. It takes him a few minutes to find a clean bottle for the milk, and when the dishes in the cabinet rattle, he winces, shooting an apologetic look over his shoulder to the stranger.

The man is awake, Solomon realizes with a start. His head is turned away, but his shoulders and arms are free of the blanket. One of his hands rests on the side of Wolf’s neck who is sniffing him and licking his cheeks. His tail thumps gently on the floor. The man doesn’t seem to mind Wolf’s attention, but Solomon clicks his tongue at the dog as he finishes storing the milk.

“Give the man some room, boy,” he commands, keeping his voice soft so as to not spook the stranger.

The man turns his head slowly, but the movement seems to pain him. His eyes squeeze shut, and he inhales sharply through his nose, chest arching under the blanket.

Milk spills and the pail bangs when Solomon hastily leaves them on the counter. He rushes to the man’s side, slotting his hand under his head to help prop him up. He holds the man’s shoulder until the pain passes. With a shaky sigh, the man opens his eyes, glancing at him. Solomon nods, unsure of what to say. He’s spent plenty of time in his head, rehearsing the conversation they might have when he finally woke: whether humor would put him at ease, or if he should stay detached and clinical like a doctor, whether he should immediately demand to know what he was doing in the woods, whether he was alone, or whether he’d been chased.

The man has no gun or knife, so Solomon knows he is far from a threat, regardless if he turns out to be some criminal. The wilderness here governs herself by her own laws, and this man has already been tested by that and found worthy.

The man speaks first, clearing his throat in a gravelly rumble.

“Water? Please,” he says, barely above a whisper.

Solomon lays his head back onto the blankets as he grabs the pitcher of water and a cup. He helps the man sit so that he can hold the cup himself. His hands tremble, spilling some of the water down his chin and into his beard. Solomon dabs at it with the blanket without thinking. He pulls his hand back sharply when he realizes what he’s doing, but the man is unaware of his distress. He takes another haggard swallow before setting the cup on the floor. His head bobs, as struggles to stay upright. Solomon wraps an arm around the man’s shoulders to keep him steady, and the man’s eyes peer up at him, that wrinkle between his brows growing deep again as he regards Solomon with unabashed scrutiny.

His pupils are blown, and he slowly drags his eyes from Solomon to look about the room. His face is blank, as though he does not comprehend where he is. He sags against Solomon, the new angle crunching his abdomen, and another wave of pain makes him grimace. Solomon scoots behind him so that the man can lean more comfortably against him. He runs a soothing hand down his arm until the man relaxes. He also notices how much warmer his skin is today than that horrible first night.

Solomon feels bolder now that he cannot see the man’s face, so he says, “I hate to ask a question with an obvious answer, but how do you feel?”

The man is silent, and for a moment, Solomon thinks he’s fallen asleep against him. However, he turns his head toward the fire, and Solomon can see his dark eyes and the sharp bridge of his nose reflecting the light. He wets his lips, frowning again.

“I feel,” he starts, his voice raw, “like I’ve been mauled by a bear.”

Solomon huffs, laughing into the man’s hair. The man is English, of all things. Solomon detects the polish in his accent, despite the roughness of his voice. Definitely from money, then.

“ _Were_ you?” he asks, his smirk hidden from the man’s view. “Mauled by a bear?”

The man grunts, nose wrinkling before he scratches it.

“You were in rough shape when I found you,” Solomon adds.

The man grows quiet. He opens his mouth and then shuts it, the frown growing deeper.

“I don’t,” he says haltingly, “I don’t remember. What happened.”

Solomon blinks. “Do you remember why you were in the woods?”

The man sighs, tensing when pain seizes him again. Solomon shushes him and helps him lie back. He tucks the blanket around his bare shoulders, trying to avoid snagging the blanket on his bandages. The man stares balefully at the ceiling. His mouth droops, eyes darting from one corner of the room to the other. Eventually, he closes his eyes.

“I don’t remember.” His jaw tenses, the muscles quaking. “I’m so sorry. You’ve been terribly kind to me, and I can’t… I don’t…”

Solomon hushes him and rubs his shoulder again, this time through the blanket.

“I wasn’t about to leave you.”

The frown lessens on the man’s face, but his eyes remain shut.

“Leave me,” he hesitantly asks, “ _where_ exactly?”

Solomon gapes at him.

“In the woods,” he says; “Wolf here—” said with a nod to his dog that the man doesn’t see “—found you. Must have heard whatever attacked you. You were in a state. Caught in an old snare of mine, so if I’m as much responsible for your injuries as whatever animal cut you up, the least I can do is give you food and shelter.”

The man sighs, delicately this time, so he won’t agitate his wounds. He turns toward the fire, burrowing into the quilt. “I’m sorry. I hate to be a burden.”

“It’s no trouble,” Solomon says as he stands. “Now, you rest. I’ll whip up some supper for us, get you fed. Snow is mighty bad outside, so don’t be thinking I’ll cast you out as soon as you’re better. The woods are no place for us this time of year.”

“Thank you,” the man murmurs.

Solomon turns to say something more, a light jab at the man’s politeness. _No need for such formalities_ , _I’m just a transplanted carpenter who thought mining might be my fortune_ or _we’re all men here, Alaska makes us all the same,_ but the man’s face has relaxed into sleep again. Solomon sighs, opening the trap door to the cellar to scrounge some vegetables for soup. Maybe food in the man’s belly will jog his memory.

⚒

The man is a heavy sleeper, for which Solomon is grateful. When the trap door slips from his hand and slams shut, Wolf flinches, but the man reacts with nothing more than a mumble before turning under the quilt.

Solomon fusses less about his noise while he cooks supper. Every time he glances from the stove toward the hearth, the man looks peaceful. Wolf settles back onto the floor as well, looking like he’s on the verge of sleep. The dog’s eyes droop, his chin propped on the man’s chest right below his collarbone.

When Solomon carries two bowls of soup to the fireplace (making a mental apology to the kitchen table for neglecting it again), Wolf raises his brow and wags his tail but otherwise does not move.

Solomon pushes the back of his hand against the dog’s snout.

“All right, up and at ‘em,” he says. “The man has to eat. Move.”

Wolf whines but lets himself be pushed off the man. He sleeps like a rock through it all, and Solomon feels guilty rousing him. A human’s touch must be different from a dog’s because it only takes a couple shakes for the man to sigh, groan, and squint his eyes open. Solomon offers him another glass of water which the man accepts with a silent nod. He’s able to prop himself up on an arm by himself, but he can’t take the cup singlehandedly, so Solomon resumes his spot behind him to keep him upright while he drinks. Solomon does not ask if he needs help eating. Instead, once he’s taken the cup from him, he reaches for one of the bowls. The bowl rests easily in the man’s lap, and Solomon spends at least ten seconds trying to finagle how he might spoon-feed him as well. The man’s cheeks grow dusky as he grabs the spoon himself.

“Thank you, but I can manage.”

His hand trembles as he takes a small sip of the soup. Some of it spills onto his chest and the quilt, but the man seems equal parts embarrassed and determined, attempting several more spoonfuls. Solomon lets him. He understands pride and decides he won’t interfere, helping the man instead by keeping him upright.

Solomon wants to ask him more questions, but the man seemed shaken by his inability to remember. He glances toward the window, where the few hours of daylight illuminate the snow-laden trees nearest the cabin, and Solomon figures that there is no rush. The answers will come, or they will not.

The man sets the spoon down after his sixth messy attempt and sighs. He leans against Solomon.

“Done already?” Solomon asks him.

The man gives a sort of half-shrug with one shoulder, his thumb and forefinger pinching the handle of the spoon.

Solomon takes the bowl from him, placing it on the side table between the chairs. “Well, there’s more if you want it. You can try again later.” He gives a cursory glance at the mess the man’s made, but it isn’t horrible. A few stains on the quilt (already old and stained), and the spills down his front went no farther than the top of his belly. Solomon clears his throat and looks up. “I can heat you up some water if you want to wash yourself. I need to check your bandages anyway.”

The man’s hands clench around the edge of the quilt, drawing it higher on his waist, as though realizing his nakedness underneath for the first time. He wets his lips, eyes staring at the fire or the blanket or Wolf — anything but Solomon — and Solomon offers some clothes.

“I’ve got some long johns that should fit you fine.” With a pointed look directed at the gooseflesh rippling up the man’s arms and shoulders (his peaked nipples), Solomon stands and goes to the bedroom, adding, “We should be about the same size, but…” He stops himself before making any comment about the man’s physique, the words feeling awkward in his mouth. He assumes that the man is thinner than him, but he’s unable to gauge his height. He comes back with long underwear, socks, and a heavy flannel shirt for the man who accepts them with quiet thanks.

Solomon turns to the stove to heat some water. Half-melted ice sloshes inside the bucket as he scoops snow into the pot, and the noise is enough to distract Solomon from listening to the man’s pained sighs as he struggles with dressing.

“If you’ll keep your shirt off,” he says over his shoulder, “I’ll help you change the bandages first.”

The man makes a noise of agreement, and they both lapse back into an uncomfortable silence, broken only by the noise of Solomon moving the pot on the stove and the man shuffling into one of the chairs facing the fire. When the water begins to simmer, Solomon removes it from the heat and carries the pot to the hearth. The man is dressed only in socks and the long-johns, but he’s sitting straight, less pain pinching his face. Wolf seems enamored with the man and has placed his head onto the chair beside his legs, staring at him expectantly until the man rubs his ears.

Solomon laughs, the noise more shrill than he would like. “He likes you.”

The man smiles, more a slight upturn of his lips than anything. “I like dogs.”

The statement earns him a lazy tail wag from Wolf, and the dog moves when Solomon nudges him with a foot. He sits opposite from the man and instructs him to lift his arms. He uses scissors to cut away the old bandages that have turned yellow from sweat and rusty from blood. They peel away with some difficulty where the blood has dried, and Solomon mutters an apology when the man winces. With the bandages off, Solomon examines his torso. His eyebrows shoot up when he sees that the smaller cuts are almost completely healed. They’re scabbed over, the skin new and sensitive, and as he wipes along their edges, he doesn’t see any signs of infection. He asks the man to turn more toward the fire so he can look at his stitching, and Solomon is relieved to see no infection there either. The sutures hold the wound tight, and while it’s a furious and dark red, the skin appears to be mending itself.

He washes the blood away, apologizing again when the man hisses.

“That should do it,” he says, setting the wet rag aside. “Let’s wrap these up, and you’ll be fine. You’re healing fast.”

The man nods, eyes shut. Solomon pats his knee before grabbing the extra linens. The man is pliant, following direction without complaint, and he holds the bandages in place as Solomon cinches the end and ties it into a knot. Once he is re-bandaged, the man slips on the flannel shirt. His arms are stiff, and he’s sucked both lips in tight. Solomon stands before him, telling him to stay still as he straightens the shirt and does up the buttons.

“You’ll be good as new in a week, I think,” he says conversationally. His fingers feel rough and bulky on the small buttons, and they slip several times. “But there’s no need to rip your stitches from putting on a goddamn shirt.”

The man frowns. “You’ve done enough. Please—”

“You’re my guest,” Solomon interrupts. “I don’t get much of those in these parts, and I’ll be damned if the one I got dies under my roof.”

The man ceases his argument. Solomon looks at his face once he’s buttoned up, and he can’t help but grin when he sees the man blushing and scowling at the fire like a scolded child. Without warning, he holds one of the man’s hands, examining his fingers. The man jerks in surprise, but Solomon holds his wrist tight. Each fingertip is pale, but they otherwise have regained their color, much to Solomon’s relief. He also can’t help but notice how oddly clean the man’s hands are. There is blood — he assumes blood — beneath the nail of his thumb and forefinger, but the others are neatly trimmed and white.

“How do your feet feel?”

The man stares at the floor, mouth hanging slightly open before he closes it.

“Fine, they’re fine.”

Solomon nods, patting the man’s shoulder. “Good. Last thing I wanted to do was snip some toes off. You’d feel the same, I’d gather.”

He drops himself into the other chair, watching as the man perches stiffly on the edge of his. Solomon picks up his bowl of soup, lukewarm at this point, but he’s too hungry to care.

“You should try eating more,” he says between bites. He stops himself from commenting on how thin the man is, adding blandly, “You’ll heal faster if you eat.”

The man doesn’t argue, but his hands still shake as he picks up the bowl. Solomon stamps down the urge to help him again and focuses instead on his own food. Some of the man’s dexterity has returned, so he’s able to eat without spilling broth onto himself, and for Solomon, that’s good enough.

As he’s scraping the last of his soup from the bowl, Solomon asks the man his name.

“I feel kinda stupid referring to you as _the man_ in my head,” he says with a chuckle aimed at his bowl.

The man is silent, for several seconds longer than what Solomon finds comfortable. He risks a quick peek at the man. He’s frowning deeply, eyes moving side to side, as though working through a difficult problem in his head. Solomon sets his bowl aside and lays his hand on the man’s arm. He expects the flinch, so he passes over the man’s surprise by squeezing his arm lightly and giving him a smile. He hopes to clear some of the storm on his face.

“Mine’s Solomon.”

The man stares at him, wets his lips, and looks away.

“I don’t...” He stops. Solomon waits. The man looks at the fire, looks at Wolf, looks at the half-eaten bowl of soup in his lap. He also looks about ready to cry, and the sight wrenches something inside of Solomon. “I remember…someone calling me _Ned_. But I don’t know if that’s my _name_ or—”

“’Ned’ it is, then,” Solomon decides, giving his arm another squeeze. He stands with his bowl, offering to take Ned’s for him. Wolf must sense Ned’s distress and immediately begins nuzzling the man’s leg. Ned pets the dog’s ears, his eyes staring vacantly at the fire.

Solomon hesitates, before telling him in a soft voice, “Don’t worry about the rest. It will come.”

Ned glances up at him. His eyes shine, but no tears have spilled over yet.

Solomon offers him a small smile, gesturing with the bowls and nodding toward Wolf. “At least you’re not alone.”

⚒

Solomon continues to nest with Ned in front of the fire, until they migrate to the bedroom. Solomon insists that Ned needs a proper bed eventually, and _no,_ he is not turning Solomon out by sharing it with him. They’ll be warmer this way, Solomon reminds him; delighted at how the statement makes Ned’s cheeks bloom pink.

As the week passes, Ned’s mobility increases, and Solomon feels less worried when he leaves him to check on the barn and the property. It seems the snow is here to stay, and Solomon watches the sun arch closer to the horizon with every day. He marks on his calendar when the last sunset will be. A panicky sensation seizes him, like he’s running out of time, but for what, he cannot say.

One morning, he returns from the barn, laden with fresh milk, to find Ned examining the book of poetry he had been reading. Solomon had left it on the side table where it accumulated a layer of dust and specks of food from their meals.

“You like poetry?” Solomon asks from the counter as he rinses a new bottle for the milk.

“Yes,” Ned says before stopping himself short. He flips through the pages, reading a few lines before he closes the book. “I believe I did. Though I’m not familiar with Whitman’s work.”

“Fair enough.”

Ned wipes the dust from the cover and goes to the shelf, sliding it between last year’s almanac and a ragged quarterly. Solomon apologizes for the lack of books.

“I’m sure there are finer libraries in other homes.”

Ned shakes his head, mouth open as he struggles with how to respond until he understands Solomon means it lightheartedly. He gives him a weak smile. “You have plenty. It’s not like… I don’t need much.”

“You say that now.” Solomon raises both eyebrows at him. “By February, you’ll be bored to tears.”

Ned ignores the quip and selects a different book, a well-read copy of Shakespeare sonnets that had come with the house. He settles on his choice and sits down by the fire, drawing his knees up. Solomon asks him if he would like to eat yet, and Ned perks up over the top of the book. He starts to rise again, wincing and using his hand to prop himself up.

“I can help. I should help.”

“Can you cook?”

Ned looks terribly serious. “I don’t know.”

Solomon stares, until he starts to recognize the different tones Ned uses if he’s upset that his memory fails him or if he’s—

Joking.

Solomon huffs, smiling in disbelief before turning back to the counter, picking through the jars of preserves he had selected that morning. Ned dips his head, smiling himself as he sets aside the book and joins him.

“I don’t know if I can cook or not,” Ned continues, with that shy smile.

“You don’t know enough to poison us. On purpose, anyway. We’ll be fine.”

“It might taste awful.”

“I’ve had a few bad meals in my time.”

Solomon hands him some potatoes and a knife. The smile that lights up Ned’s face is brief but brilliant, and Solomon’s breath hitches as though he were a ridiculous smitten boy. They comfortably work side-by-side with a domesticity similar to the one Solomon witnessed — and envied — at the Heathers’ home. Ned’s hands begin to shake after he has peeled and diced the four potatoes, so Solomon gently pries the knife from his hand and directs him back to the chair.

“I’ll finish the rest.”

Ned shakes his head, even as he looks pale and has to lean onto his arms once he is seated.

“I want to help,” he mumbles into his hands.

“You’ve helped enough.”

“I want to earn my keep.”

 _Christ, this man_.

“You being here is enough,” Solomon says. “I won’t work you into a fever. Or worse, have you reopen your stitches.”

Solomon leaves him, returning to the stove. Ned lapses into a sullen silence, alleviated somewhat when Wolf sits by him. He gets up once to put more wood on the fire, but he doesn’t try to argue again. Solomon finishes the meal, scraping their portions onto two plates. He tells Ned it’s ready.

When Ned doesn’t respond, Solomon looks over his shoulder to the endearing image of Ned, fast asleep in the chair, his legs stretched out in front of him. His chin rests on his chest, right above where he loosely holds the book of poetry. Solomon shakes his head and, for once, takes his plate to the kitchen table and eats there. He lets Ned sleep.

⚒

Much to Solomon’s dismay, Ned doesn’t let him forget their conversation, so when Solomon offhandedly mentions needing to air out the bedclothes, Ned offers to do it for him. When Solomon protests, Ned reminds him that he mentioned going hunting before the sun disappeared for the season. Solomon balks at him, surprised that Ned knew that. He must have been thinking out loud; a damnable habit developed from weeks living by himself.

“Fine,” he grits out, “but the dog stays with you. I’ve got only one gun, and I don’t want to leave you with…”

He trails off, unsure what threat frightens him. Ned lets the comment slide, too busy giving Wolf a piece of bread to care.

Solomon takes his time getting ready to leave. He’s wasting precious daylight, but he can’t shake his apprehension. Ned ignores him, throwing himself into the task of securing twine from one wall to the other, stripping the bed, shaking out the quilt over the stoop, and washing the linens. He seems more capable doing this than he had attempting to cook, so Solomon finally leaves, content that Ned won’t hurt himself while he’s gone.

The snow is packed hard enough that he can walk on it with relative ease; though every time he slides, Solomon makes a note that he should fashion some snowshoes or, hell, see if the old man had some stashed in that collection of junk in the loft. He travels his usual path going behind the cabin, toward the creek. It amazes him how much the snow changes the landscape, disguising boulders and hillocks that were familiar in summer as unknown, alien shapes of ice and shadow.

He glances up at the sky. The sun is a haloed disk above the trees. He estimates that he has an hour of daylight left, perhaps two. He will have to hurry.

He visits his usual traps and snares, most of which are empty. He figured as much. Either the animals have settled down for winter themselves or they’ve wised up to the presence of a new predator. He keeps hiking through the snow. He tries to stay near the trees where he had carved symbols into the bark, marking his own trails. He pauses when he hears something that surprises him: the rushing of water. The forest is otherwise silent, just the occasional rustle of leaves in the wind; no birds, no insects; and animals are wary. The snow blankets the forest as snugly as a heavy muffler, dampening all noise. Unable to stop himself, Solomon follows the sound of water to sate his curiosity.

The sound leads him to the river, the same one on whose bank he had found the droppings and wolf fur. Most of the water is trapped under a layer of opaque ice, but the last few days have been mild enough for some of it to thaw. The powerful currents have broken through, bubbling like miniature geysers through the cracks. The sight and sound is enough of a change from the motionless woods that it feels like a balm to Solomon. He scrambles down the embankment to get closer to the water, to be nearer to this rare relic of running water before winter can snatch it away.

He crouches at the edge of the bank. He taps the ice with the heel of his palm, trying to determine if it is sturdy enough to hold his weight. He isn’t willing to risk getting his boots and trousers wet, so he decides to watch the water from where he is. He lays his rifle alongside him so he can rub his mittened hands together. He breathes on them through the wool of his muffler. The air stings as it travels through his nostrils and down his throat, but it clears his head, sharp as silver. He remembers when he and his mates first arrived in Alaska — how different this wild, untouched land was from the smog-ridden industrial hubs he left behind in England. Alaska was where men like him could find their passion to live again. Where men like Bill Heather could meet the love of their life and start a family unhindered by the expectations of the Empire. Where men like Billy Gibson could live freely without shame, without the threat of hard labor for their lifestyle. Where men like Magnus Manson could be treated well and respected for their might, rather than scorned for simple-mindedness. Where men like Cornelius Hickey would run and keep running because running is all they ever knew.

The crunch of gravel shatters the tranquility like a gunshot. Solomon jerks his head up and sees a lone caribou descending the bank on the opposite side of the river. It gingerly walks across the ice, heading toward the flowing water. Solomon holds his breath. He doesn’t think the creature has seen him yet. He moves in fragments, keeping his whole body still and precariously balanced on the balls of his feet, as his right arm reaches for his rifle. The caribou takes no heed of him, sliding across the thicker ice until it has reached its destination. It lowers its head to the water and drinks. Solomon raises his rifle and aims. He slowly slides the woolen pad of his finger onto the trigger, but the click of the lock is loud.

The caribou’s ears twitch, and it lifts its head. It sees Solomon immediately, but it’s too late. He stares at it down the barrel of a gun, and if the caribou tries to run, the ice will hinder its escape.

It does not run. It looks at him, with an alarming amount of intelligence, some quiet sorrow in its black gaze, that once Solomon pulls the trigger, thrust backward from the recoil of the shot, he lets out the breath he had been holding. His heart pounds in his chest, and he watches as the caribou stumbles to the riverbank, blood pouring from the wound in its neck.

Solomon sees it fall but does not hear it. The river and the snow muffle the sound.

⚒

Retrieving the caribou takes too long. Solomon’s jaw throbs from grinding his teeth during the treacherous crawl over the ice, and his back twinges after dragging the caribou’s body to a narrower portion of river to cross again. He removes his mittens only long enough to field dress the carcass, but the warmth of the caribou’s innards staves off the cold. They lie steaming in a pile as he wipes his hands on a rag and pulls his mittens back on. He considers leaving the innards be, but he doesn’t want to risk a predator tracking their scent. He digs a hole in the snow and shoves the innards into it, piling snow on top until it stops melting around them.

He glances to the sky where the sun has disappeared behind a ridge, darkness fast approaching. He mutters a curse under his breath, hurrying back to the woods where he finds a fallen branch. It will have to make do. Pulling rope from his bag, he lashes the caribou to the makeshift sledge. He heaves the branch over his arm and starts walking, rifle within reach, his eye constantly scanning the gaps between the trees.

It is fully dark when he reaches the cabin. A light bobs on the edge of the porch from a floating lantern. Solomon narrows his eyes as they adjust to the new glare. He drags the caribou closer, dumping the branch onto the ground by the path leading to the barn.

Ned stands at the edge of the porch. He has wrapped himself in a blanket, his feet inside Solomon’s second pair of boots. He’s holding the lantern, lighting the steps leading into the cabin. His eyes are wide when he sees Solomon approach.

“You were gone long enough I started to…” His voice trails.

Solomon nods to the sledge behind him.

“Caught a deer. It’ll be enough fresh meat to feed us for a while.”

He leans against the porch to catch his breath, his muffler hiding his frown. Ned nods and gestures at the caribou with the lantern.

“Do you need—”

Solomon interrupts, “What I _need_ is a reason you’re outside. You’re not dressed for the outdoors, never mind the cold.” Ned starts at his tone, at which Solomon is surprised himself. He pauses, softening his voice. “I’ll take this to the barn, hang it up. I’ll only be a moment.”

Ned has turned his glare to the boards beneath his feet, the lantern held at chest level. The light shines upward against his face, cruelly warping his brow and the lines around his eyes. Solomon grips the edge of a log in the cabin’s side, fingers straining from digging into the wood too hard.

“Ned?”

He turns back into the cabin, all but slamming the door behind him.

Solomon lets go of the log, stepping down into the snow. The caribou’s glassy eye stares up at him, accusing.

“The fuck would you know,” he mutters as he hoists the branch over his shoulder and drags it to the barn.

⚒

Once he has stored the caribou in the tiny alcove of the barn where he keeps his tools and has hung a meat hook, Solomon returns to the cabin. Ned isn’t in the main room. The linens are drip-drying from the twine, and Solomon sees a pot of soup sitting on the table. The fire burns low in the grate, but it’s been recently tended with fresh kindling.

He removes his coat and stops by the table, resting his hand on the back of a chair. There are two places set across from each other with clean bowls and shined flatware. A plate of sliced bread sits in the center accompanied by two knives and the crock of butter. There is even a fresh pot of tea. How Ned managed that with the ancient tea leaves, Solomon can only wonder.

He glances at the bedroom door. It is shut firm.

Solomon lets out a long sigh, one more lingering glance at the meal and the fireplace, before he goes to the door and knocks. No answer. He waits a couple seconds before opening the door.

Ned sits on the stripped mattress, the quilt wrapped around his shoulders and an open book on his knees. Wolf is lying on the bed with him, fast asleep against his side. Neither Ned nor Wolf look at Solomon when he enters. Now that he’s joined them, Solomon is at a loss for words. He sticks his hands in his pockets to keep himself from fidgeting, but the longer he stands there, the more resolutely Ned ignores him and reads.

“It’s warmer,” Solomon offers haltingly, “in the kitchen.”

Ned turns a page. Solomon sits on the bed. The mattress dips enough to rouse Wolf, but Ned remains unmoved. Solomon faces away and stares at the grain in the wall.

“How is it?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder. “The poetry?”

That, at least, makes Ned briefly look at him. With no more than a low grunt, he flicks his wrists up, tilting the book’s cover where Solomon can see the faded gold lettering _Frankenstein_ on the spine. Ned lays the book flat on his knees again as he returns to reading. He rubs Wolf’s head as the dog grows restless between them.

“Ah, no poetry today, I see.” When he’s met with more silence, Solomon struggles to fill the air, “Maggie gave that one to me. Uh, Bill’s wife that is. Friends of mine. From Dawson.” Ned says nothing. Wolf nips gently at his hand. Solomon swallows and continues, “Weird that she likes scary stories so much, but she told me that it was exactly what I needed where I was going. Would give me a better-suited _Alaskan constitution_. So she said.” Solomon weakly laughs. Ned frowns at the book when Wolf demands more attention rolling into Ned, flipping his belly up. “It was something about learning to respect the wilderness and the dark. How fear and respect are a lot the same thing—”

Wolf starts whining. Ned snaps the book shut, shoving Wolf off of him.

“Stop that,” he bites out, at which Solomon’s heart drops to his stomach, feeling as much reprimanded as the dog.

Wolf’s ears go flat. With a whine, he crawls off the bed and leaves the room, tail tucked between his legs.

Watching the dog go, Solomon swallows. “Right. Well. I’ll leave you to it.”

He almost leaves the door open, but the thought of being able to see Ned from the kitchen table is too much, so he shuts it behind him.

⚒

Ned doesn’t emerge from the bedroom for the rest of the evening. Solomon spends the time constructing a variety of elaborate scenes between him and Ned, where this strange tension was never born; and where their easy and shy camaraderie never left. Wolf is grumpy where he lies curled in a tight ball in the corner of the room, cast from Ned’s presence. Solomon left the table as Ned had laid it, and after a long hour of waiting by his untouched food, he knocked on the door, asking through the wood if Ned wanted anything to eat. Silence was his only answer, and Solomon wasn’t bold enough to shoulder his way into the room again.

When the clock on the mantel chimes eight o’clock, Solomon abandons the idea of seeing Ned until they retire for the night.

He wants to yell. He wants to grab the man by the shoulders and shake him. He desperately wishes Ned were the type to hit him back, to break something, to match his screams. He can perfectly imagine how the man would actually react; shrinking from Solomon’s red hot anger, withdrawing deeper into himself until he’s coiled as tightly as rope.

Solomon mutters a curse and dresses to leave. The air here is suffocating. At least in the barn, Solomon can fill the damn room with his voice.

When he reaches the barn, his clothes hanging crooked off him, he yanks the door open and slams it loudly. The flame inside the lantern flickers wildly, threatening to go out, when he flings it with too much force onto its nail. He stamps his feet and tosses his hat aside before hooking the caribou on the gambrel. The cows shift uneasily as he pulls out a couple knives and his saw, dumping them onto the table with a clatter, and they continue to eye him as he cuts a slit down the caribou’s back and begins to rip off its skin with vicious satisfaction.

He stops when he realizes he’s muttering under his breath. He pushes Ned far from his mind while he finishes the task with less zeal. He leaves the skinned caribou hanging, where the meat can drip and age. The cold will keep it for a time, though he knows that he will need to cure the meat before the week is over. He leans against the table as he wipes the blood from his hands and the knives.

Exhaustion sweeps over him, and he flattens his palms over his eyes, dragging his hands down his face and his neck. He releases a long, loud groan. The cows stir, mooing in return.

“I hear you.” He laughs a little, feeling his throat constrict. “I hear you.”

He crosses the barn to check on Tess and Tulip. They doze where they stand, though their ears perk when he draws near. He replenishes their food and breaks the clear layer of ice on their water, but otherwise, he leaves them be. Cricket ignores him, and he returns the favor, once again checking on her food and water and nothing else. The chickens also sleep when he pokes his head in their coop. The hours they spend with their faces burrowed in their feathers have only increased with the cold, and after a brief examination of the coop itself, Solomon finds himself deprived of any more chores to keep him from the cabin.

Sighing, he fixes his clothing, and he takes the short walk back to the cabin as slowly as possible.

The interior of the cabin is dark, the fire no more than a few sparking embers under the grate. The linens have been taken down and all food stored. The table has been cleared, each dish returned to its home. Wolf hovers by the fireplace, but there is no sign of Ned. The clock shows that it is close to midnight, which startles Solomon. He had no idea that he had stayed so long in the barn.

He resigns himself to go to the bedroom. The room is pitch black, and he attempts to undress without bothering Ned. His shins knock into the chest, and he bites back a groan when pain erupts below his knees. However, he hears no noise of waking from the bed, so he hobbles around the chest and slips under the covers without further disturbances.

Despite the hour, Solomon is wide awake. His eyes remain open, staring at the darkness of the room. He listens to Ned breathe. The deep inhales and exhales calm him, soothing the restless beating of his heart.

Solomon slides his hand toward the center of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he says to the darkness.

Beside him, Ned sighs. He turns onto his back.

“No, I’m—” His voice is clear. Solomon wonders if he had been sleeping at all. “I’m your guest. I should be sorry.”

Relief washes over Solomon, and he smiles, fond at the exasperation in Ned’s voice.

“You didn’t do a thing wrong,” he insists. He reaches farther, until his hand bumps Ned’s arm. “We’re strangers, and here we’re having to bunk up for the foreseeable future.”

Ned huffs, but he doesn’t shrug Solomon’s hand off. They lie close enough that Solomon can feel his body heat.

Solomon imagines he is inching along a crumbling precipice when he seeks Ned’s hand. He curls a single finger around one of Ned’s.

“I barely know you,” he says.

“I barely know myself,” Ned replies.

Ned’s hand interlaces with his, and he turns to face him. Although Solomon can barely make out his features in the darkness, he reaches his other hand and finds the warm skin of Ned’s neck. He runs his fingers higher until they brush against his hair and beard. He wants to say something along the lines of _we’ll go it together_ , but the sentiment feels bulky, overly maudlin.

Instead, he says, “Let’s start here,” which sounds closer to the truth.

⚒

Solomon wakes the next day feeling the same kind of exhaustion and invigoration one does after scaling a mountain. The quiet between him and Ned endures, but the tension leaves. He breathes easier now. He suggests that they check Ned’s bandages, and he discovers in the process that Ned heals remarkably fast. The wound in his side is completely closed. It leaves an impressive scar from rib to hip, pale like a slash of lightning. Solomon says as much as he takes scissors to the sutures, removing them with several fast snips.

“Scars charm ladies, or so I’ve been told.”

Ned doesn’t reply, but Solomon notices with satisfaction that the skin above his beard is pink.

Now, with no bandages to hinder him and no reason for Solomon to coddle, Ned inserts himself into Solomon’s daily routine. He cooks, cleans, and chops wood. The barn and the animals remain Solomon’s responsibility. He’s hesitant to give that up, even to a man as helpful as Ned. The chores go by quickly with two of them attacking them each day, leaving them with hours to spare. They frequently fill the time before the fireplace, each performing his own private rituals — such as Solomon clumsily mending a torn shirt while Ned combs Wolf’s shaggy fur — or oftentimes, they talk and share stories of home.

Solomon tells Ned about his shop back in England, how he apprenticed under a carpenter from an early age and set aside enough money to start his own business. He met Bill that way, a logger with whom he built a friendship which has lasted them years across land and sea.

“Why did you leave England?” Ned asks him.

Solomon shrugs. “Everything around me was changing. More people, more machines, more fog in the air. I felt trapped.”

He explains that Bill inherited a large sum of money, following the death of his father, and the two of them pooled their savings for tickets across the Atlantic.

“We met others along the way. Before Bill and I knew it, we had ourselves a merry band of uprooted Englishmen.” Solomon’s laughter withers as he thinks about the others. “We all went our separate ways eventually.”

Ned tilts his head at the sudden shift in Solomon’s tone. The curiosity on his face is plain, and worried that Ned may ask more probing questions, Solomon changes the subject.

“You’re English, too,” he says. “What brings a man like you here?”

Ned frowns. He leans back into his chair as though shrinking from the sudden attention on his person.

“I think,” he starts slowly, “I must have had similar reasons: wanting to see something new, what the world had to offer. I had seen so much already. I was a mate on a whaling ship—” A surprised grin blossoms on his face, his eyes growing bright. A laugh bubbles from him, and Solomon leans forward, transfixed. “I remember that now. I remember the smell of the sea, the flap of the sails. I remember whales that would swim alongside us because they didn’t know any better. I remember ice in the water, these massive bergs that would almost glow in the sunlight. I think we must have gotten stuck at some point. I remember walking on the ice with our dogs in the pitch black.” Here, the smile lessens, his brow knitting together as he thinks. “It’s strange though. How a place that’s so inhospitable can be so beautiful all the same. During winter, the stars were bright enough that they’d light up the ice until it looked like another world, like the surface of the moon. It’s much like here I suppose. Strange but beautiful.”

“Yeah, it can be,” Solomon agrees.

Ned catches him staring, and Solomon lets him. From where he sits, his forearms propped on his knees, one reach of his arm would bridge the gap between him and Ned. He waits, and Ned wets his lips.

“I certainly feel more at home here than I did in the Arctic.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Ned leans forward in his chair again, his dark eyes never straying from Solomon’s face. Their knees shift closer. Solomon stands, stepping around Ned and the side table.

“Got a bottle of gin I’ve been itching to try,” he says as he scrounges a couple glasses, nothing fancy but nicer than their usual clay mugs; “Bought it in Dawson. The man told me it’s a mountaineer’s special.”

“What makes it special?” Ned asks him with a wry smirk, accepting the offered glass.

Solomon pours them both a finger each, and he regards the liquor in his glass.

“It’s dual wielding, apparently. Hard enough to knock a man on his back. Also potent enough to thin paint and clean stains.”

“Useful.”

He snorts. “Indeed.”

Ned stares into his glass before lifting his eyes to Solomon’s. “And what’s the occasion, for cracking open your rare bottle of mountaineer’s special?”

“To the first days of winter,” he says in a toast, holding his glass up. “To _real_ winter.”

Ned holds his glass up as well. “To Alaska.”

They empty their glasses. Solomon coughs, thumping his chest with a fist. Ned wheezes as well, pinching his nose with a groan.

“That is foul.”

“It is.”

Ned holds out his glass, and Solomon refills it. The liquor burns warm in his belly. Already, he feels his limbs growing loose with it. He takes a kitchen chair and spins it around so that he faces Ned when he straddles it.

He holds his glass up again. “To you remembering the sea.”

Ned smiles bashfully, eyes dropping to the floor before he bravely locks eyes with Solomon. “To you surviving my cooking.”

Solomon doubles over in laughter and almost misses the sparkle in Ned’s eyes. They drink. Solomon refills their glasses.

He stares at the clear liquid, swirling it in his glass, before he raises it, saying in a much more subdued voice, “To the friends we’ve lost.”

Ned holds his gaze. “And to friends we’ve gained.”

He watches as Solomon tosses back his drink. He drinks his in a single gulp as well, never looking away from Solomon.

⚒

“The window—”’ Ned gasps, nodding his chin toward the glass pane where the curtains have fallen open, revealing the light from a waxing moon. “It’s open.”

Solomon grunts, far too occupied with his teeth sunk in the meat of Ned’s shoulder and his hand down the front of his trousers. His teeth break skin, and Ned arches beneath him, a moan wrenching from him. His hands bunch up Solomon’s shirt as he tries to tug the hem from his trousers. Solomon separates himself long enough to pull his braces off his shoulders and tug his shirt over his head. He crumples it into a ball and throws it somewhere past the two chairs, outside the light of the fire. Ned watches with his mouth open, immediately reaching for Solomon’s belly and chest, carding his fingers through the wiry hairs there.

Solomon leans over him, framing his head with his forearms. The rug is coarse under his skin where his elbows dig into it, but he doesn’t care. Not when he licks and bites Ned’s bottom lip until it’s swollen and not when Ned bucks against him with a moan. When he feels Ned pulling at the waistband of his trousers, he grabs his hands and pins them over his head. Ned lets out a gravelly groan, his eyes heavy-lidded, and when Solomon kisses him, his mouth falls open, sliding his tongue against Solomon’s. They kiss until they are both breathless, until Ned’s hair is a finger-drawn mess around his head, and until Ned’s knees pinch Solomon’s sides as tight as a vice.

Ned glances at the wall again.

“The window. Sol—”

He interrupts Ned with another kiss, nipping his bottom lip. He rubs his thumb against Ned’s cheek.

“There’s no need to worry.” He kisses him again, focusing his attention on the deliciously hard cock between Ned’s legs. “There’s no one here but us.”

Not a soul but the trees and the moon and the stars to see Solomon undress Ned with infinite care, kissing and sucking and biting the skin as it is revealed. Not a living creature but the fire and the walls and the stones of the mantel to hear him shout as Solomon picks him apart, has him straddling his lap and his cock rubbing against his belly. Nothing but the rug and the chairs and the cupboards to watch the sweat drip down the center of Ned’s chest as he rocks onto Solomon, his head tipped to the ceiling with eyes closed and mouth open in prayerful ecstasy.

Solomon loses himself in the worship of Ned’s body; where they are partnered but alone, together but isolated; no men in these woods but them, no men but animals among the trees.

⚒

At some point during the night, when the fire has died and the room gone cold, the two of them pick themselves up and go to their bed, where they share more kisses and Solomon pulls on Ned’s cock until he comes again, gasping and clawing at the blankets, one leg hooked around the back of Solomon’s thighs.

In the morning, Ned wakes first. Solomon struggles to remove himself from the bed when his head throbs and his mouth feels stuffed with cotton. Ned smiles at him when he stumbles into the kitchen, where the aroma of eggs frying greets him and a fire is already blazing in the grate. He accepts a cup of water from Ned with mumbled thanks, and after he empties it, he sees that Ned has brought him the pitcher as well. He refills his cup and drinks again, grateful when some of the fog leaves his head.

Ned returns to the counter where he shoos Wolf away from where the dog weaves around his legs. Solomon rubs a hand over his eyes, and he realizes when they focus that Ned is dressed only in socks and his nightshirt. The night before feels as recent as minutes, and Solomon feels every inch of his skin tingle from the memory.

He clears his throat. “What time is it?”

Ned shrugs, glancing toward the clock. “Late.”

Solomon looks, too, seeing the hands resting past nine. He sighs, feeling sluggish despite the extra hours of sleep he usually doesn’t allow himself. He drinks another glass of water, soothing his parched throat. He brings the glass and pitcher back to the counter. Ned jumps in surprise when Solomon slips an arm around his waist and kisses the side of his neck. He bunches up the side of Ned’s nightshirt, rubbing his palm on his thigh and squeezing the give of muscle.

“I’m going to check on the animals,” he says against Ned’s skin. When he feels Ned shiver, he grins and kisses his neck again, his lips pressing on a bruise from last night. “Be back shortly.”

He returns to the bedroom to pull on his trousers and boots. Wolf sits waiting for him by the door as he dons his coat. He pats his leg as he goes outside, holding the lantern to light the way. Wolf obediently follows.

There is a fresh, if thin, layer of snow coating the ground. It has an odd manner of illuminating, as though the snow were able to detect even the faintest hint of light from the distant sun or the myriad dots of stars in the sky. The lantern dangles from Solomon’s fingers as he walks through the dim light as though hypnotized. He snaps out of the trance when Wolf shoves against his legs whining and barking. He blinks and finds himself at the edge of the clearing, opposite the barn and cabin. Mere inches from the toes of his boots is the thick darkness of the woods, where the shadows appear to undulate and pulse like the belly of a great, slumbering creature. A silent gasp catches in his throat, and he stumbles backward, the light from his lantern swaying erratically.

He clicks his tongue at Wolf as he continues to walk backward, his eyes trained on the darkness until he is far enough that he no longer fears turning his back on whatever beckoned him toward the trees. The air inside the barn shifts as he shoves the door shut behind him. The animals are impatient, the whites of their eyes flashing as they crane their necks to look at him.

“Sorry, loves,” he says as he hangs the lantern, “it’s been a long morning.”

The cows forgive him readily. Even Cricket seems relieved to see him and nudges his arm as he leaves her stall. The chickens are pecking at the floor of their coop, and he lets them wander free in the barn as he checks on the caribou. The meat is in good shape, should be ready to butcher and salt within the next day. The bucket and ground beneath the caribou are clean. Solomon frowns, pushing aside straw with his boot as he examines the dirt floor. He takes his knife, cutting a shallow slash along the meat. When no blood oozes from it, Solomon digs deeper with the knife, but he still finds no blood.

Wolf starts yapping at one of the chickens. Solomon flinches hard enough that he drops the knife before he sticks his head around the corner and yells at Wolf to quit it. He ushers the hens back into their coop, slapping a hand at Wolf when the dog starts growling again.

“The hell’s gotten into you,” he says with a light kick against Wolf’s side. He grabs his knife and sheathes it, fetching his hat and lantern. Wolf cowers and whines as he passes the room with the caribou, and Solomon snaps at him to hurry it up. “You’re all out of your minds today.”

The clearing looks darker as Solomon exits the barn. He tells himself it’s a trick of the eyes, but he feels a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. He stops half-way between the barn and cabin. He lifts his lantern, casting its light as far as he can over the clearing, but there are no odd shadows, no unexplained prints. Wolf reaches the stoop and turns to him, whining. Ned opens the door for him, and when Wolf races indoors, Ned is about to close the door fast again when he sees Solomon staring at the woods.

“What is it? Solomon?”

Nothing but snow and trees. Nothing, he tells himself. He hurries to the door so that Ned may close it.


	5. A Full Moon, Pt 1

**Winter, 1899.**

A month passes since the night Solomon found Ned in the woods, and it frightens him how attached he has become to the man’s familiar presence, how quickly he has descended into peace and contentment. Solomon fears that the peace deceives him; that it is an ill omen of some dreadful thing lurking in the woods, hiding behind the bright disk of the moon, something he has not the courage to face.

It comes at night, the dreadful thing.

Solomon wakes from a fitful sleep; his dreams brimming with winedark skies and dead men rotting in their beds, their bleached ribs protruding from leather flesh, empty eyes picked by crows. Nausea clings to him as his eyes blink open, the remnants of the dream tricking him that he is elsewhere, so much so that he does not remember where he is, not yet. Beside him, Ned is panting and writhing. He scratches at his sides, turning away from Solomon. He is drenched in sweat, his discomfort so intense that he mindlessly strips off his shirt as he tries to alleviate the sudden fever ravaging his body. In a stupor, Solomon watches wordlessly, slow to comprehend Ned’s pain. He jumps when Ned falls off the side of the bed, landing with a loud crash that thrusts Solomon out of his trance.

“Ned!” he cries, shoving aside the blanket and leaping to his feet.

The corners of the room are inky, but the curtains are open. Moonlight bounces off the wall, illuminating the patch of floor where Ned drags his hands, uncaring as his skin and nails snag splinters from the wood. A high-pitched groan slithers from him as he thrashes on the floor. He has shoved himself against the wall. Tears leak from his closed eyes. He breathes unevenly and rapidly, the rhythm distorted by every distressed whine.

Solomon says his name again, softer this time, as though speaking too loud might spook him, make him run. He crouches before him and tries to touch him. Ned lashes out, bellowing a deep _no._ His eyes are black in the dim light of the room, and he stares through Solomon as though he were nothing more than phantom and shadow. He stares beyond him, beyond the furniture, beyond the four walls of the room and the roof over their heads. Another spasm hits him, and he slumps to the floor, face up, back arched. The skin of his chest stretches taut over his ribs and hip bones, and his body shakes as mightily as a leaf caught in a wind. A ripple travels across his muscles, the skin violently twitching.

Ned groans.

“I need to— I need to—”

He doesn’t finish the thought. Another scream rips from him, dwindling to a pitiful sob as he rolls onto his hands and knees. Solomon edges closer, trying to wrap his arm around Ned to pull him up, but Ned shoves him off. He staggers to his feet on his own, and Solomon watches as Ned stumbles from the bedroom, his shoulder slamming against the doorframe.

“Ned, where are you going?”

He follows, stepping into the kitchen to see Ned double over. He grabs his head, ripping clumps of hair out by the handfuls. He crashes against the kitchen table, knocking over a chair. The water pitcher tips and falls to the floor, but Solomon hardly hears it shatter over the wails tumbling from Ned. Water pools around the broken shards as Ned straightens with a deafening howl. He breaks into a run, slamming into the front door as he struggles to open it. Solomon tries to stop him. He leaps over the chair and broken ceramic, but his hand slashes through air as Ned yanks the door open and flees into the yard, stumbling and sinking into the snow.

The cold slaps Solomon, stealing the breath from him. His face burns, eyes watering, and he feels ice encasing his beard and eyebrows with alarming speed. The frost is enough warning to make Solomon hesitate in the doorway, half-dressed as he is. Ned is practically naked, wearing nothing but his underwear and socks, but Solomon sees that he doesn’t get far. He reaches the edge of the clearing where the firs grow thick as a wall when his knees crumple beneath him, and he falls to the ground. Moonlight glints off the snow, casting Ned in such a pale light that he looks no more alive than a corpse.

He winces when Ned lets out another bloodcurdling scream. The knobs of his spine shift under his skin, and his shoulder blades contort, extending from his back like a pair of skeletal wings. He claws at the ground, dashing through snow as though searching for something to hold onto, something to anchor him. He clutches at his neck with gnarled hands as he arches again. His knuckles look broken and rheumatic, the nails overgrown like—

Like claws.

Solomon swallows, unable to look away. He _cannot_ look away.

Ned throws his head back with a scream. His hips compress. His knees bend unnaturally. His skin grows ashen, hair sprouting rapidly over the naked flesh. His feet stretch, same as his hands did, the toes ending in overgrown, dark—

Claws.

The hair keeps growing until there is no skin left. Each of his limbs warp until they no longer resemble anything human. Ned’s shrieks are so piercing, not even the snow mutes their intensity as they echo into the vast, black sky. Something in those cries stirs Solomon; they’re more animal than man, like those of a hare caught in the jaws of a fox, a coyote shot by a hunter, or — a creature entangled in a snare.

Solomon runs to the bedroom to grab his trousers and a proper shirt, rushing in the hopes that he will catch Ned before he loses himself in the woods. He yelps when a ceramic shard wedges itself into the ball of his foot. He blindly feels through the scorching blood for the shard. He rips it out with a yell, impatient to yank on socks and boots. He skids back into the kitchen, gritting his teeth when pain blooms through his foot and up his calf.

“Wolf!” he shouts as he throws on his coat and hat.

The dog is nowhere to be seen. He lets out a loud curse. Wolf must have followed Ned. Stupid, stupid! He grabs his rifle from the shelf before he remembers the damn thing isn’t loaded. He hasn’t gone hunting in over a week and had been cleaning it.

“Jesus, fucking goddamn, son of a whoreson—” The litany punches out from between his gritted teeth as he rips open drawers, searching for the bullets he must have stashed somewhere safe in the meantime, and _goddamn_ if he didn’t pick the worst possible time to clean the bloody rifle. Bullets found, he grabs them, shoving them into his pocket. He’s wasted enough time as it is.

He dashes out the front door, sliding on the snowdrift that’s blown onto the stoop and hurdling over the steps when he gains enough traction to push off the wood. He sinks to his knees in the wet snow, and he rushes across the clearing where he last saw Ned.

Nothing remains, save shredded pieces of wool, tufts of dark fur, and a spray of blood that disappears along the edge of the towering trees.

Solomon throws the rifle around his shoulder, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Ned!” he yells to the trees; no response but his own voice despondently echoes back. “Wolf! Ned!”

From a distance, he hears Wolf’s high-pitched yip. Solomon knows the sound carries far because of how deathly still the night is otherwise. The silence is so loud that he feels a constant ringing in his ears, broken only by Wolf’s faint barking. He follows the noise, clambering through the snow. He falls as often as he makes progress, but he keeps yelling their names.

“Ned! Wolf!”

Only the dog answers, his plaintive barks slowly growing nearer and louder. Solomon’s heart is hammering, and god alive, he knows he’s fighting the burn of tears as he shouts Ned’s name to the surrounding darkness. His bare hand brushes against the metal of the rifle, and he hisses when he peels his fingers away and fumbles with his mittens. The sting in his cheeks fades. He knows the numbness is more dangerous than the pain, but he forgot his muffler back at the cabin. The mittens make digging the bullets from his pocket a mighty task. He drops one of them where it disappears beneath the snow into a miniature chasm. Shit, each bullet costs about an arm and a leg, and he struggles to not drop a second as he loads four bullets into the rifle’s chamber before pulling the lever and cocking it. He feels the click under his palm as sharply as he feels the cold air stabbing his teeth.

He takes a deep breath through his nose and hollers Ned’s name again.

The moon stares down at him balefully, lighting up the surrounding landscape with its indistinguishable features; the white mounds that could be bracken or boulder, the deceptive plains that could be solid ground or could be root-tangled ditch or could be the bank next to a frozen and silent creek. Solomon knows nothing of the woods here, and no matter where he looks, he sees none of his familiar trails or markers. Every time he yells Ned’s name, his hope grows as tiny and fragile as a mouse hiding in the deepest recesses of his heart.

He moves forward. The silence shatters when he hears a rattling howl, too hoarse and too desperate and too _alone_ to belong to a wolf. It was no dog either. Solomon stumbles toward the noise, crying Ned’s voice in a croak, his throat seizing up with despair.

He turns a bend and stops, dropping to one knee in exhaustion. The scene before him unfolds like a tableau, framed perfectly by two fir trees weighed heavily by snow.

They are on a hill where the trees grow sparse, and there is nothing breaking the great white canvas of the ground except the shadows around the edges — and the huge, furred monster standing hunched in the center, surrounded by a mess of pawprints in the disturbed snow. Wolf is here as well. He cowers by the trees, his ears flat on his head as he cautiously eyes the hulking creature.

Solomon wheezes from the cold and his fatigue. He struggles to keep the rifle steady in his hands.

The courage to yell is gone, so he whispers, “Ned?”

The creature does not hear him — how could it, from fifty yards away — but it stays on alert. It raises its head, turning its gaze toward the sky or the trees (Solomon cannot say). He jerks when the thing turns enough for him to see the dead fox clenched within its massive hand. The fox’s head is missing, and the creature’s maw is smeared in blood, illuminated perfectly by the cold light of the moon. A cloud of warm air puffs from its mouth as it paws at the ground, and a low growl rumbles from deep within its chest. It tosses the carcass aside with a snort and continues to pace along the snow, as though confused, troubled. It suddenly arches, roaring as though in pain. It throws its head back, howling at the night sky.

Solomon is stock-still. He centers the barrel of his rifle on the thing, but he cannot bring himself to lay his finger near the trigger, fighting all his instinct to do so.

He recalls a day in the mines, back when he was foolish enough to dig underground; before he learned to appreciate the sight of the sky and the sun on his neck while he excavated in open-air pits; he sensed the cave-in as a vibration through his chest, a tingle in the tips of his fingers, an itch beneath his skin. He thought to ignore it, but when he felt the first quake beneath his feet, he asked Tommy if he also felt the tremor and looked up in time to watch the tunnel collapse into rubble and dust, throwing him into darkness and instantly crushing Tommy beneath the debris.

Standing here in plain moonlight, a short distance from what he believes must be Ned, he feels the quake in the tunnel, but he cannot shoot. He can barely aim. He cannot blink his eyes, nor can he turn away.

_Ned, look at me, please Ned._

Snow crunches near him as Wolf leaves the sanctuary of trees. He keeps his head lowered, tail tucked tight against his body. He whimpers, the keen soft and drawn out.

The creature snaps its head at Wolf. It drops to all four limbs, bearing its bloodstained teeth with a snarl, but still the dog creeps closer. Solomon holds his rifle steady. Only his eyes follow Wolf as the dog flattens himself and crawls on his belly along the ground. The creature—no, _Ned_ , he reminds himself, his head hurting at the thought—growls at Wolf, and the dog pauses, whining again. Wolf is near enough that one swipe of the creature’s claws would likely kill him. The barrel of the rifle sways as Solomon begins to shake. He holds his breath, and much to his dismay, once Ned stops growling, Wolf advances again. Wolf weaves between Ned’s legs, rubbing against his chest. Ned growls again, ending in a snort and huff when Wolf flops to his side, his front paws bent and extended into the air. He lets out a soft bark, more air than sound, but it is enough invitation for Ned to lean over him and sniff him. Ned tilts his head, growling again, but with such a crooning gentleness that Wolf rolls onto his feet and begins licking his face.

Solomon’s grip goes lax, and the rifle slides forward, the barrel tipping toward the ground. He stares in dumbfounded wonder as the creature runs its clawed and furred hand down Wolf’s back. Wolf maintains a prone position, whining softly as he continues to make himself small and unaggressive beneath Ned.

Another spasm hits Ned. He stumbles from the dog, clutching at his head. He gnashes his teeth while groaning, the noises wavering between animal and human. Solomon wants to move closer, but fear keeps him wary. He lingers by the trees as Ned throws his head from side to side, sobbing and howling. Ned turns his face to the sky — Solomon’s gaze moves with him — toward the expanse of glittering stardust and aurora. At the center of it all floats the moon, perfectly round and bright.

A branch snaps behind Solomon, and he twirls about, aiming his gun blindly into the dark. He stumbles over his feet, landing on his back, but he sees nothing in the woods.

A few feet away, Ned starts to growl again. Solomon realizes his mistake and faces the clearing, but it is too late.

Ned is crouched on all fours, eyes trained on him, primed to lunge. He approaches Solomon slowly. He is already close enough that Solomon can see the individual teeth inside his mouth, how caked in fox’s blood they are. Wolf is barking from the side, making a racket loud enough to wake the dead, but he stays out of Ned’s way, too fearful (or smart) to interfere.

Solomon knows he should raise his gun, but he finds each of his limbs weighed down by the terrifying notion that he has become prey. Nothing of the man he knows reflects in the black eyes glaring at him, and right as Ned is ready to pounce, Solomon forces himself to aim and shoot.

Time moves slowly, and Solomon is momentarily blinded by the flash of the shot. Through the ringing in his ears, he hears a deafening howl. He blinks, his vision refocusing in time to see Ned clutching his shoulder where a gash rends the muscle. Blood pours down his chest as he staggers backward, stumbling in the snow. Solomon pulls himself to his feet, keeping the rifle raised. It’s a comfortable weight in his hands, but he knows he doesn’t have the stomach to cock it again, much less shoot.

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to. Ned falls onto his misshapen knees. He snaps his jaw and whines before rolling onto his side, curled into a tight ball. The fur sheds off his skin in clumps, and with the cracking of sinew and bones, the creature disappears into a thin, pale man lying on the snow. Solomon rushes to Ned’s side, cradling him against his chest, uncaring as the blood seeps onto the front of his coat. Ned is unconscious or close to it, and the cut on his shoulder oozes, the blood beginning to clot. Barking wildly, Wolf runs forward and shoves his nose against Solomon’s arm and against Ned’s face. Solomon tiredly shrugs him away with a groan, too exhausted to reprimand the dog. His knees creak as he picks up Ned, but he hugs him close, grateful that his body is warm and that he is breathing evenly.

Maneuvering through the snow with Ned’s added weight in his arms is difficult, but the path back to the cabin is clear as he retraces his steps through the shadowy woods, Wolf a close specter on his heels.

The moon and stars watch him go.

⚒

Solomon jolts awake in the armchair by the fire where he collapsed hours earlier, moving like a man trapped underwater. His memory trickles back; how he dragged Ned to the fire, cleaning and binding the gash on his shoulder, mimicking Ned’s first night in the cabin. He used the last vestiges of his energy to carry Ned to bed, tucking him safely under the quilts.

Sitting up in the chair, Solomon sees that the bedroom door is shut. There are remnants of blood smeared on the floor and dark stains left by puddles of melted snow. His filthy coat is flung over a kitchen chair, the rifle sitting on top of the table, his boots lying abandoned somewhere by the kitchen cupboards.

The clock reads that it is half past ten. It must be morning, though the darkness outside is pervasive as always. Solomon stomps to the window and pulls the curtain shut. There is a scratch at the bedroom door, and Solomon turns to see Wolf’s paw and snout nudging it open as he shoves himself through the gap.

“How is he?” he asks the dog, immediately feeling stupid for doing so. “Fine, fine. I’m coming.”

He finds Ned fast asleep, looking far more peaceful than he had a right to be. There is the normal pinch between his brow, but he doesn’t frown. He breathes deeply, no nightmares or monsters upsetting his sleep. The bandage on his shoulder looks clean, the bleeding having already stopped. Solomon sits on the bed beside him and brushes the hair from his face. With a soft moan, Ned turns into his hand and opens his eyes. He blinks sleepily, eyes hazy as he examines the room and the bed. His gaze pauses on Solomon.

“Your face,” he says in a hoarse whisper.

“Never mind that. How do you feel?”

“Horrible.” He closes his eyes and rolls onto his back, wincing with a sharp gasp. “Like I died and had to dig myself out of my own grave.”

Solomon huffs, smiling at the colorful description. “Well, you didn’t die.” He hesitates, knowing how close Ned came. “How much do you remember?”

Ned opens his eyes again, staring at the ceiling. When Solomon reaches for his hand, he flinches but doesn’t pull away.

“I remember the moon. And pain. Heat. Blood. I remember—”

His voice trails. Wolf jumps onto the foot of the bed, nosing the line of Ned’s calf through the quilt. Ned frowns, lifting his head to look at the dog.

“Neptune,” he says, the word as sensible as it was senseless.

The dog lifts his head, ears perked. His tail starts wagging. Ned laughs, looking shocked. He laughs again, the sound dissolving into a soft sob as Wolf shuffles closer and nestles against his chest.

“I remember my dog.” Ned rubs Wolf’s ears, laughing and crying in equal amounts, as he whispers _Neptune_ over and over into the fur of the dog’s head.

Solomon watches in silence, murmuring that he’ll get him some food before extracting his hand from Ned’s and leaving the bedroom. His chest feels tight. He doesn’t want to examine why.

⚒

The wound on Ned’s shoulder closes overnight with inhuman speed. The blisters on Solomon’s face, however, grow worse.

For a long while, he sits in front of his shaving mirror, prodding the dead skin, but finds that when he is the subject beneath the knife, he is more squeamish than he would care to admit.

“Do you want to…” Ned offers, not finishing the thought. He watches Solomon from across the room, concern pinching his face.

Solomon hesitates. Ned’s reflection wobbles inside the mirror, but he can’t bring himself to look at it. He stares at the floor instead before setting the mirror on the side table and nodding.

Ned sits on the hearth before him and takes over. Solomon flinches when Ned reaches for his face. They both hesitate; Ned’s hand poised in midair and Solomon’s hands balled into fists on his thighs. Ned swallows and continues, his touch gentle as he wipes around the ice burns with a damp cloth. While Solomon tries to sit still, uneasiness floods him, making him antsy and less pliant a patient than Ned. The numbness fades, replaced by a searing pain that makes Solomon grind his teeth, his nails digging into his palms. It takes a helluva lot of effort to resist scratching and ripping all his skin off. Ned pauses, removing the cloth. Solomon hates that, hates how careful Ned is to touch him.

The night of the moon remains a slumbering giant between them, a dead tree ready to fall if only given a shove.

Solomon doesn’t ask, and Ned doesn’t tell, and the tree rots more between them.

Ned doesn’t shove, but instead, he uses the tip of a forefinger to turn Solomon’s head this way, then that. He frowns as he inspects the burns, and the crease between his brow deepens as he inspects Solomon’s left cheek for several seconds.

“The color has returned to most of them,” he says in a grave voice, “but it’s turned gray here.”

Solomon knows where he means. The nerves are gone in that part of his face. He feels it when he talks, feels it when he blinks.

“Right.” Solomon has seen this before on the trail. “If the skin’s dead, we’ll need to cut it off.”

Ned winces. “All right. Do you—”

Solomon pushes Ned’s hands aside and stands to retrieve his knife — the monogrammed one with the ivory handle. Seems fitting, though Solomon cannot fathom why he kept the damn thing and didn’t toss it off the side of a cliff when he was still in sight of Fort Yukon. He lights a candle and holds the knife over the flame, until its edge glows orange. Ned watches, enraptured, though he looks sick when he understands Solomon’s intent.

“It’ll be easier if you do it,” he says, handing Ned the knife.

Ned stares at the knife for the longest time before he takes it and kneels before Solomon.

His voice is brittle as he murmurs, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Solomon bites his tongue to keep himself from making an ill-humored crack about Ned getting his revenge for the gun shot on his shoulder. He doubts that Ned would appreciate the joke.

Instead he says, “It’s gonna hurt either way.” He takes a deep breath, propping his arms on his knees and tilting his chin up, bad cheek facing the light. “Just be quick, and it’ll be over for both of us.”

He shivers when Ned traces the edge of the burn with the tips of his fingers. His lips grow thin in concentration as he holds the knife a scant inch over the wound, testing the sweep of the knife before he sets the hot edge on the burn. The metal slices into the skin easily. Solomon closes his eyes, unfeeling until the knife is half through. He hisses through his teeth, and Ned stiffens, his hand going still.

Solomon opens his eyes to slivers, biting, “Keep going.”

Ned swallows and, bracing his hand on the opposite side of Solomon’s head. He cuts the rest of it in a single motion. The dead skin falls to the floor, and Ned holds the cloth to the cut to subdue the bleeding.

“Hold it there,” he says, his other hand stroking at Solomon’s hair.

The pain is sharper now, throbbing like a pulsing vein, but Solomon follows Ned’s instructions and holds the rag in place while Ned finds a butter knife in the kitchen. He heats it over the candle as well, and once he deems it ready, he tells Solomon to move the rag. Without warning, he presses the flat edge of the knife against the cut. Solomon slams his heel hard into the floor. His teeth creak as he chomps down, biting back a loud groan. This close to his ear, he hears the skin of his cheek sizzling. Gradually, the pain lessens to a dull ache, and once Ned removes the knife, the cauterized wound no longer bleeds.

Solomon realizes his hands are clutching Ned’s shoulders, and when he starts to unfurl his fingers, Ned catches one of his hands and holds it to his cheek. He gently squeezes his fingers and kisses Solomon’s knuckles.

“The worst of it is over,” he says.

He holds the mirror out for Solomon to see himself. The remains of the burn are a nasty brick red on his cheekbone. It will leave a rather spectacular scar. He touches it with his fingers, relieved when no blood pools from the skin.

“Suppose it can’t make me uglier.” He sets the mirror aside, managing a smirk as Ned stands and cleans up the rag and knives.

“You’re not ugly,” he tells Solomon in an earnest tone; his voice drops shyly as he walks across the room, “You never were.”

The comment settles over the room. Solomon leans back in his chair, eyes on the fire, hand unconsciously brushing the remains of the burn again. When Ned comes back to the fire, his face has a sweet blush on it, and Solomon is relieved to find some of the tension gone from himself. _This_ is the Ned he knows, the moon and her wiles be damned. Ned sits stiffly on the edge of the second chair, his hands wrapped loosely around a cup of water. Wolf ( _Neptune_ ) stands from where he was sleeping in the corner and pads across the room to lie at Ned’s feet instead. Solomon props his feet up on the hearth as he begins to doze off, and the last thing he sees before his eyes slip shut is Ned leaning down to pat the dog’s side.

⚒

Their daily rhythm resumes as though the full moon, the transformation, and their injuries never occurred. The familiarity is nearly enough to knock Solomon off-balance, but as he and Ned continue to dance around the subject of that night, the peace feels as fragile as it does precious. Solomon is loath to break it, so they continue as they were. Ned’s scar fades to nothing; Solomon’s is a burgundy crescent on his face. _Wolf_ becomes _Neptune_ , and outside, in the great dark, the moon closes her eye in a wink.

They have time until it happens again, and goddamn if Solomon is determined to not scare off the one good thing in his life.

Christmas comes and goes with zero fanfare, but when the last day of December knocks at their door, the two of them decide to celebrate. They dust off the bottle of gin and toast a midnight as black as midday, with nothing but the stars and the secretive moon to mark the time.

Ned downs his glass in a single gulp, mouth twisting from the taste. He holds the cup to his lips, settling his heavy-lidded gaze on Solomon. His breath fogs the glass, obscuring the lower half of his face. Solomon’s vision grows soft around the edges, lessening the angle of Ned’s features. He quickly drinks a second glass of the terrible gin, feeling warm and languid. He thinks he might fall asleep like this, sitting near the fire. He might drop his chin to his chest for a couple winks, knowing that it makes no difference when he sleeps and when he doesn’t, not with the days as black as night. No one here, animal or man, follows any normal schedule anymore.

Ned slices through his haze with the damning question:

“Are you scared of me?”

His voice is clear, but it takes Solomon a second to register the words.

“Scared?”

Ned continues, fingers white from where they grip his glass, “The way you look at me sometimes. Like you think I’ll disappear, or I’ll hurt myself, or worse…” He turns back to the fire, keeps the glass close to his face as some sort of flimsy shield. “You act like I’ll do something. You don’t touch me like you used to. You’ll start talking to me only to cut yourself off. You…you act differently than you did before that night.”

“I don’t,” Solomon says, but he finds that he has no excuse ready, no proper reason to give Ned.

Ned loudly sighs, reaching for the bottle with shaking hands as he tries to pour another drink. Solomon drops to a knee beside him and takes the bottle. Ned won’t look at him, and the smile he attempts as he stares resolutely at the fire crumples.

“You don’t trust me,” he breathes.

Solomon balks. “What, of _course_ I do—”

“I don’t blame you.” His hands still shake, even as he clenches them into fists to quell the trembling. “After what happened, I wouldn’t trust a thing like me either.”

Solomon takes the glass from him and leans forward, catching Ned’s lips in a long kiss. Ned curls his fingers around the collar of his shirt, frightened to let him go. When he pulls away, he finds Ned’s eyes screwed tightly shut. Solomon keeps him close by sliding his palm around the back of Ned’s neck, their foreheads bumping together.

“Don’t say things like that.”

“I’m a monster.”

“You’re not.” Another kiss. “You’re not.”

He wishes he could give Ned a more eloquent assurance, anything to scour the fear from his eyes and the despair in his voice, but there is too much to dig through to get there.

Words were never his specialty, so he slips an arm under Ned’s legs and around his back, carrying him to the bedroom and laying him on the bed. He gives him all his affection and trust in every kiss, every brush of his knuckles, every choked noise muffled into skin and cloth. He lets Ned take control as he lies back and holds his hands above his head. Even in candlelight, Ned looks beautiful on top of him, with his lean limbs, dark hair, pale skin. Solomon doesn’t look away, keeps his own eyes open, as Ned becomes bold, kissing him from neck to belly. Solomon lets out a ragged breath as he watches him lap at the tip of his cock before taking him fully into his mouth.

Heat coils in the pit of his belly, and Solomon whispers, “Easy.”

Those dark eyes look up at him, pink lips stretched prettily around his cock. He raises his head, and when it springs free, Ned curls a single finger around the base to keep it still as he nuzzles his lips and cheek against it. The rub of his beard almost hurts, but the sensation is also enough to make Solomon’s head buzz. Lips travel farther, past the base of his cock and the sensitive skin of his inner thighs. Ned’s tongue swipes against the skin of his stones as his fingers lazily stroke him.

It’s pleasant enough that Solomon can picture himself finishing like this, with Ned’s hand loosely fisted around him. He tenses when Ned’s tongue strays farther between his legs, swiping close to his hole. Ned lays a hand on his knee as he sits up, mouth open.

He licks his lips. Solomon tracks the pink tip of his tongue, breathing deeply in and out until his knees relax and fall open.

“We don’t have to…” Ned hesitates.

“I want you to.”

With a hoarse _c’mere,_ Solomon pulls Ned back on top of him _._ His thighs frame Ned’s hips, and both of their hardened members grind together. Ned kisses him soundly, their tongues sliding together, and with every roll of Ned’s hips, Solomon groans into his mouth. Ned pulls away, sucking the first two fingers of his right hand. Heat pools in Solomon’s stomach at the sight, and he tugs Ned’s fingers from his lips, bringing them to his own mouth instead. He kisses the tips of the fingers first, his eyes locking with Ned, before he slides them deep into his mouth.

Ned’s fingers are heavy on his tongue, clean enough that they taste mostly of soap and salt and something distinctly _Ned_. He moans around them, twirling his tongue with as much care as though they were Ned’s cock. The thought must go through Ned’s mind as well because he pants, hips stuttering and grinding on Solomon’s thigh. He seems determined to watch, even with his heavy-lidded eyes that threaten to shut with every passing second. His eyes only leave Solomon’s face when he bends to kiss his neck or his chest.

Solomon lets the fingers slide from his mouth, biting the skin just hard enough to leave the indent of his teeth. Ned surges forward and catches his lips in another hard kiss. The kisses move from mouth to neck to shoulder and chest. Solomon’s hands fly to the back of Ned’s head when he drags his tongue across a nipple, and the sensation is enough to distract him from the gentle pressure growing gradually stronger between his legs. His hands tangle into Ned’s hair with a moan when the tip of the first finger breaches him. The stretch is always an odd sensation for him, but never unpleasant.

Ned presses an open-mouthed kiss on his sternum, and Solomon closes his eyes, head tipping back on the pillow. Noises spill from him before he can stop them as Ned deftly opens him, his thumb rubbing the edge of his rim. Ned scrapes his teeth along his chest, catching a nipple, and Solomon’s toes curl, distracted enough that he doesn’t realize Ned slipped a second finger in until he is removing both of them.

One more kiss, gentler and chaster than the last, and Ned sits back.

“I could,” he starts and then stops with a swallow, both of his hands cupping Solomon’s knees; “It might be easier if I prop your hips up with a pillow, or — if you’d like to lie on your stomach…”

Solomon’s face burns, but his embarrassment fades when Ned locks his eyes with him, shyly looking at him through his lashes. Solomon shrugs and nods, covering the back of Ned’s hand with his own.

“Whatever you think is best. But I’d like to watch.”

Ned nods, tongue darting from between his lips. He leans past Solomon and grabs one of the pillows. Solomon lifts his hips so that Ned can center it beneath his lower back. He closes his eyes once more, feeling exposed, acutely aware of his nakedness. Ned brushes his hand against Solomon’s stomach, leaning forward to kiss him beside his navel.

“I’ll go slow,” he whispers against the skin.

Solomon’s first half-lucid thought when he feels the blunt pressure of Ned’s cock is that it won’t fit. His muscles give way with excruciating slowness, and Ned whispers at him to _breathe_ as he presses a thumb against his hip bone. His other hand interlaces with Solomon’s.

It seems hours later, when all the tension finally gives out, and for the last inch, Ned slides in with ease. With his hips pressed flush against the back of Solomon’s thighs, he seeks his mouth once more, nursing and sucking his bottom lip. His legs are shaking, but he waits to move until Solomon squeezes his hand and nods. With a sigh, he presses his forehead to Solomon’s shoulder and starts to roll his hips.

Everything is alight with sensation, and Solomon squeezes Ned’s hand tight to keep himself from prematurely spilling. His calves thrash against Ned’s legs as he picks up the pace, eyes fixed on his, frowning as though deep in concentration. He varies his thrusts, some long and deep, others shallow and fast, and as he finds the rhythm that makes Solomon’s vision go white and his hand grapple for the headboard, his eyes slide shut. A series of gasps fall from his lips as he fucks into Solomon over and over, and when Solomon feels Ned’s hips stutter, he reaches around him and spreads the palm of his hand along the curve of his rear.

“Keep going,” he breathes, followed quickly by a moan. “Keep— _christ_ , don’t—”

Ned wraps his hand around Solomon’s cock, and all at once, it becomes too much and too little. Solomon yells as his orgasm seizes him. His legs clench around Ned’s waist, and his back lifts off the bed. Ned follows him, sucking a bruise at the base of his neck. His hips snap quickly and brutally against him, until he groans, his whole weight folding Solomon onto the bed. Solomon can feel his cock pulsing inside him, and he holds the back of Ned’s neck, angling his chin up to kiss him.

Ned is careful as he slides his cock out of him, and Solomon grunts at the sensation; the residual burn, the slick of it, the sudden emptiness. Ned settles half on top of him, half beside him. Solomon wraps his arm around his shoulders, bringing Ned’s head to rest on his chest. They lie like that, a tangle of sweaty limbs, hearts beating rapidly.

When the candle threatens to sputter out, Solomon asks, “How was that?”

Ned sniffs, turning to press a kiss below his collarbone. “I should be asking you.” He nuzzles his skin, hiding his face with a chuckle. “But it was nice.”

Solomon stares up at the ceiling, a smile growing wide and stupid on his face. He cranes his neck to kiss the crown of Ned’s head before lying back, mesmerized by the shadows cast on the ceiling by the dying candle. Ned shifts above him, propping himself up on an elbow. He idly traces Solomon’s chest with his fingers, carding through the short coils of hair. He meets Solomon’s eyes, looking terribly serious, before losing his nerve. He glances down, smiling bashfully as he continues to stroke along Solomon’s shoulders and chest.

His mouth opens then closes.

He eventually settles with a muted, _“_ Happy new year.”

Solomon laughs, pulling Ned on top of him for a kiss, and Ned kisses back with a laugh of his own, the grin widening on his face and scrunching his nose.

A happy new year, Solomon thinks giddily. Here’s hoping.


	6. Men Such as Us

**Winter, 1900.**

With the lethargy of perpetual night and the heavy shroud of winter, a calm descends upon Solomon’s small valley. Strange to think that the winter is only temporary, that a few short months from now, the sun will end her pilgrimage south and return bearing saws for the ice and sickles for the fields; the trees would shed their winter coats, and meadows would glow golden and lush with carpets of daisy, coneflower, aster, and cat’s ear.

The promise of spring rings hollow in Solomon’s ears as he trades sunlight for candle, so long as the wax doesn’t run out.

(too many stories of men driven mad by the darkness; cautionary tales and folk history alike.)

He and Ned fill the hours in whatever manner they can. They keep the cabin spotless, the animals fed and happy. Ned teaches him songs from his times at sea — Solomon carries the tune better with a clear, strong voice. Solomon teaches Ned a waltzing two-step that he had picked up at a dance hall down south, and while Ned narrowly avoids stepping on his toes, he says in a thick voice that he must have had ladies queuing up to be his dance partner. They teach each other games like children — riddles and rhymes, jacks and marbles. Solomon tries arm wrestling (to which Ned complies with a half-smile and a roll of his eyes), and Ned teaches him a two-man game of whist (which Solomon only half-understands before he finds better entertainment by pressing his lips to the sensitive patch of skin behind Ned’s ear while his hands abandon cards for buttons).

They spend their time singing, dancing, fucking, and playing. Solomon begins to think that winter ain’t too bad, not anymore, not when you’re in fine company.

As luck would have it, their peace is interrupted halfway through January. He’s walking from barn to cabin, slogging through fresh snowfall with a pair of ratty snowshoes strapped to his boots, his muffler yanked clear up to his eyes, and the light of the lantern bobbing across the clearing. His eyes are trained on the ground as he walks quickly, hurrying from the negative forty-something weather when a pair of feet slide into the edge of his light.

“Hellfire and damnation!” he yells in an undignified screech as he leaps back, nearly falling onto his arse.

The feet are attached to a dark pair of trousers that disappear behind the hem of a coat at the knees; all clothes too fine for a stroll through the snowy black woods. The strangeness of it all spooks Solomon mightily, and he is about ready to turn heel and hightail it back to the barn when —

“Please don’t go!” Even as a shout, the voice is smooth as molasses, and— _English._ Again.

The man keeps his distance, raising his gloved hands before himself.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, hazarding a single step forward, closer to Solomon and the cabin.

The light from the lantern spills onto the stranger’s face. He squints, blinking rapidly as his eyes adjust, and Solomon is struck by the youthfulness of the man’s features. He wears no hat. No muffler, but a dark scarf wraps around his neck up to his chin, its tail tucked under the well-tailored edges of his coat. He is pale, and Solomon might think him sickly, were it not for the fullness in his cheeks and his bright eyes. On any other night, Solomon might think the man a ghost come to torment him.

With the lantern held high, Solomon peers at the woods behind the stranger. He sees no path of footprints nor any grooves in the snow, indicating where this man came from. He carries nothing on his person, but there is a trunk tipped on its side in the snow immediately behind him.

“You lost?” Solomon asks, his breath moving in hard, painful gasps behind his muffler.

The man tilts his head, a polite if tight smile on his face.

“Somewhat. ” He gestures a gloved hand toward the cabin. “May we continue our acquaintance indoors? It’s a bit chilly.”

The man’s stilted but polite manner catches Solomon off-guard. He dumbly nods.

“Okay, yeah.” He staggers past the man, the deep snow hindering his footsteps. “Do you need help with your luggage?”

“No.” The man smiles again. “Thank you.”

The grace with which the stranger handles the trunk is admirable. He hardly disturbs the snow as he grabs both handles and holds the trunk at chest level. Maybe he is a phantom. He certainly moves as seamlessly as one. Solomon glances behind him to be sure the man follows. He thinks that he should be more accusative, that he should ask more questions, that he shouldn’t be leading another complete stranger into his home. But it’s dark, and it’s cold. He ain’t a cruel man, even when people accused him of being a grouch, and he is not about to let this man stumble into a ravine and shatter his leg or freeze to death or both.

Solomon opens the cabin door, ready to rush inside and slam it shut behind him. Ned’s nowhere to be seen, likely still asleep. Wolf ( _Neptune_ ) sits on the rug by the fireplace. His ears stand straight up as he lifts his head, a growl rumbling in his throat.

“Stop that,” Solomon grumbles. What is _taking_ the man so damn long outside? He glares out into the darkness to see the man standing at the edge of the stoop, face blank and staring with wide eyes at the room beyond. “For chrissakes, you’re letting all the cold air in. Come inside. You’ll catch your death out there.”

The man smiles again, wider this time. Solomon winces for him, wondering how his teeth don’t hurt. He kicks aside a stray snowdrift as he closes the door behind the man, and as he strips the damp outer layers of his clothes, he pauses when he feels the man’s gaze on him — the uncanny brightness of his eyes piercing, like he’s sizing Solomon up — and he stops short of removing his trousers. He’ll let them dry by the fire once he’s got a cup of coffee in hand.

The stranger keeps his gaze squared upon Solomon, and he’ll be _damned_ if he’s the first one to look away, wondering why the hell this man acts like being invited into someone’s home is like being challenged.

The man lowers his eyes after a lengthy pause. His smile remains frozen and poised, though Solomon spies a tight muscle working in his jaw as he sets the trunk onto the floor.

“I must thank you for your hospitality—”

“Mind telling me what the hell you were doing out there?”

The man blinks at the floor. The smile falters briefly before it bleeds into a more appropriate smirk, irritation flashing hot across the man’s eyes as he looks up at Solomon.

“I’m looking for someone.” His tone is flat, making it all too clear that he’s not inclined to say anything more than that.

“Right,” Solomon mutters, turning to the stove.

He digs for the tin of coffee and a pot, and he drops the mugs onto the counter with too much force. He winces from the clatter of clay hitting wood. Behind him, the man is silent.

The tension must agitate Wolf ( _Neptune_ ). The dog growls some more, the end of it breaking into a confused whine. Another _shut up_ hops to the tip of Solomon’s tongue, ready to say how the dog is more bite than bark, but he looks over his shoulder in time to see the man melt into a brilliant smile. He lets out a soft, disbelieving laugh.

“Neptune?” He holds a hand out for the dog. “You old boy, you. Come here.”

Neptune ( _Wolf_ ) cocks his head, whines, growls, then whines again. The man kneels, beckoning with an open hand, and Neptune shambles closer, his eyes bouncing from the stranger to Solomon and back. His tail starts to wag once the man has both hands on the sides of his head, petting him in the same manner Solomon has seen Ned pet him.

Solomon starts, muttering a swift _damnit,_ when the coffee begins to scald on the stove, but he hears the stranger over the noise of him removing the pot and straining the coffee.

“Here I thought you were gone for good,” Solomon hears the man say to Neptune ( _Wolf). “_ How did you end up here?”

Solomon finishes pouring the coffee into his mug (and Ned’s mug). The third sits empty. He leaves it empty, but there is more coffee sloshing inside the pot as he drops it onto the counter with a thud.

“You know him?” Even to his own ears, he sounds harsh. He softens his voice; “The dog?”

Looking embarrassed, the man stands. He refuses to face Solomon, casting his gaze instead at the room, at the mess of books and cards left on the side table and at the flannel shirt Ned has claimed for himself thrown over the arm of a chair.

“He belongs to a friend.”

“A friend?”

The man’s mouth hangs open, as he mulls over his answer. Both turn their heads when the bed creaks in the next room, followed by the padding of feet on the floor. Ned, dressed only in his underwear and a long shirt, pokes his head past the door. He looks half-asleep, and he frowns at the stranger and then at Solomon.

“What’s going on?”

The man straightens when he sees Ned, his face brightening into a smile that fades into something smaller but infinitely more sweet.

“Edward?” He laughs, voice thick, while Ned blinks at him, confusion replacing his drowsiness. “It _is_ you. You’re all right.”

The man crosses the room, but Ned shies from his touch.

He stutters, “I’m sorry. I don’t…” He looks panicked. “I don’t know you. I’m sorry.”

The effect of his words are immediate on the stranger. The man’s face falls as Ned hurries back into the bedroom and closes the door behind him, another muted apology stumbling from his mouth. Solomon sighs and retrieves Ned’s mug. The man stands stiffly before the bedroom door, as though rooted in place.

Solomon clears his throat, ready to dump Ned’s coffee back into the pot. “I take it you know Ned.”

The man’s head whips to him, eyes blazing. Solomon pauses, his hand hovering over the pot. The man’s anger is gone as soon as Solomon sees it, and he composes himself with a hand brushing down the front of his coat and the other fixing a strand of his hair.

“Yes,” he says, voice strained as he refuses to look Solomon in the eye. “I know him.”

Solomon raises an eyebrow, offering the untouched mug like a peace offering.

“Coffee?”

The man smiles. All gentleness is banished from his face again, replaced by this glacial mask, the same poised smile he gave Solomon not a half hour earlier. Solomon is not one to back down. He holds the man’s gaze as he nods at the kitchen table. He carries both mugs there, shoving one across the table toward an empty chair. The man looks away first, hard smile in place, but he sits in the offered seat. Behind them, Neptune scratches his paw against the closed bedroom door.

The man curls his finger around the handle of the mug but otherwise does not touch the drink.

“You got a name?” Solomon asks as he leans back in his chair, holding his own cup close to his mouth, the steam warming his face.

“Jopson.”

“Fine. Jopson,” he says with a sharp grin. “I’m Solomon.”

He takes a long sip of his coffee, swiping at his lip when some of it catches on his beard. Jopson sits perfectly still and composed. He doesn’t drink the coffee. Solomon thinks he could be offended if he weren’t so damn mistrustful of him.

“Now,” he says conversationally, leaning his elbows on the table, “how do you know Ned?”

⚒

The man introduces his full name as Thomas Jopson. He knows Ned from sailing, where he frostily explains that he had befriended _Edward,_ the first mate of their whaling ship. After an unfruitful and disease-ridden voyage north of the Arctic circle, _more bergs and disaster than whale in those waters_ , the two of them remained close, and following a series of deaths in Edward’s family, the two of them decided to pack up and go elsewhere, taking their chances on brighter horizons.

“Tragedy has a way of bringing men together,” he says with a wry smile, “The change of scenery was something we both wanted.”

Solomon grunts, knowing better than to say anything. Jopson’s bitterness is clear.

When Jopson says no more, Solomon explains how he found Ned and how his memory suffers — dodging the specifics of their intimacy, his skin tingling from the memory of having Ned naked in his bed and on his lap and between his legs. He explains the trap that caught Ned and how Wolf ( _Neptune_ ) took Solomon right to him.

“It’s like he knew right where Ned was, where to look,” Solomon says, draining the last of his coffee, “Makes sense, since it turns out he’s your dog.” He stands, nodding at Jopson’s untouched cup. “More coffee?”

“No, thank you.” Even his politeness is icy, but Solomon ignores it as he pours more for himself.

“How were you separated?” he asks once he’s seated again.

“We were attacked.” Jopson says it like he thinks Solomon is stupid. “I spent weeks thinking Edward was dead. I found your homestead by chance.”

Solomon finds the idea of such coincidence hard to believe; what with the lack of roads leading to and from the property, the heavy snow masking all landmarks, and the constant night making travel nigh impossible. But the man sitting before him found a way, and if it weren’t for Neptune, Solomon would think his story full of shit.

“What attacked you? Wolves, a bear?”

Jopson’s hands switch from holding the cup to tapping restlessly on the tabletop. He doesn’t answer Solomon’s question, and after a lengthy pause, he removes his hands to his lap. He levels Solomon with a penetrating gaze.

“You call him Ned.”

Solomon pauses mid-sip, arching a brow before setting his mug down. “I do. Is that a problem?”

Anger flashes across Jopson’s face again, and for a ludicrous second, Solomon swears that the fire grows dim in the presence of such fury. Maybe he’ll throw his coffee into Solomon’s face, leap across the table to strangle him.

Instead, he gives Solomon a tight-lipped smile.

“You said he has little to no memory, yet you call him Ned.” The smile widens; Solomon notices a tremor working along his jaw as his voice goes flat. “Why?”

Solomon shrugs. “Gotta call him something.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Jopson spits, smile stuck. “His name is Edward, but you call him Ned. Why?”

“The hell you want me to say?” Solomon glowers, his voice growing loud, his hand curling into a fist as he jabs a finger against the table. “He was next to dead, you son of a bitch. I found him, a complete stranger, brought him here and nursed him back to health. And _yes_ , his memory was hurting. He told me he remembered someone calling him Ned, and that was _that_.”

“Solomon.” Ned stands by the bedroom door. He both sounds and looks tired, the shadows deep under both eyes.

Jopson flinches slightly, and his face falls, the anger disappearing. Ned joins them at the table, sitting in the chair beside Jopson. He gives Solomon a plaintive look, as though begging them to stop fighting. Solomon bites the inside of his cheek hard, standing to pour Ned some of the lukewarm coffee.

He sets the mug before him, but Ned doesn’t acknowledge it. He’s turned partway to Jopson, eyes focused on his hands, mouth opening and closing as he determines what to say. In his defense, he is much more composed — and dressed — than he was earlier, but he looks distraught.

“I am truly, dreadfully sorry,” he says.

Jopson regards him, some unspoken grief making the blue of his eyes shine. The smile never leaves his face, but it grows smaller, more genuine.

“It’s hardly your fault, Edward.”

“But I’m hurting you.” Jopson inhales, looking away. “—and for that, I’m sorry.”

Ned reaches for him, whether to pat his arm or hand, Solomon couldn’t say. Jopson stands, sidestepping Ned’s chair. He speaks while walking toward the door, “I have some of your belongings here. It isn’t much. I don’t have everything from the caravan, but I have some of your clothes. Your books.” He slips his coat back on, his voice wavering. “I don’t mind you going through it. It could— It might help.”

Solomon stands when he opens the door. The cold air bites, stealing his breath.

“Where are you going?” he demands.

At the same time, Ned says, “Wait, please, it’s freezing outside.”

Jopson looks back with wet eyes, brave enough to face Ned for only a second before he shakes his head, assuring him in a tiny voice, “I’ll be fine, Ned.”

He shuts the door behind him. Ned races to the window to watch Jopson go. He pulls the curtains aside, staring into the darkness.

“I can’t see him.” He leans closer to the frosted glass. “He’s already gone.”

Solomon picks up Jopson’s coffee and dumps it.

“You heard him,” he mutters, “Said he’ll be fine.”

Ned remains unconvinced and stands silently by the window. He wrings the edge of the curtain between his fingers, and Solomon finally goes to him, embracing him from behind, trying to find words to comfort him, but all that he can manage is “He’ll be back. Come on.” He kisses Ned’s shoulder and gently wrests the curtain from him, sliding them shut and hiding the black wilderness from sight.

⚒

Evening approaches, but Jopson does not return.

Solomon wonders where the man has hidden himself as he gives into the same temptation of glancing out the window every now and again, searching the snow for footprints or the trees for any sign of human life. Ned spends most of the day pacing the cabin. He helps clean the kitchen and scrub the floors, but he otherwise spends the hours in fretful silence, unable to sit still long enough to read, too distracted to pay Neptune much mind.

The trunk lies unopened by the door. Solomon and Ned worked around when they were washing, as if afraid to touch the leather, as though the surface itself might be diseased.

After another round of pacing by each of the windows, Ned drags one of the kitchen chairs beside the fireplace, and he sits with his feet propped on the hearth. The chair tips beneath him as he leans back, his knee bouncing. He keeps glancing at the chest for long seconds until Solomon is about to lose his goddamned mind.

“Will you look inside the damn thing already?” Solomon asks him from where he heats their supper at the stove. “He said you could. I don’t see the problem.”

The chair thuds as Ned pulls his feet toward himself. He takes a deep breath and stands, but he doesn’t move from beside the fireplace.

“It ain’t gonna bite you,” Solomon adds unhelpfully.

Ned scowls at him, and Solomon sets aside his knife with a sigh. “Ned, what’s the worst that could be in there? Nothing in there will hurt you.”

To prove his point, he walks to the chest and kicks the side of it with his foot. His boot connects with a thud, but it isn’t enough force to nudge it even an inch.

“It sure is heavy,” he comments when Ned finally comes closer, “Did you bring your whole house from London?”

Ned snorts, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth, a sight that fills Solomon with relief. He kneels beside the trunk, examining the latch. A padlock rests on the hinge, but it lies open. Solomon takes a step back, giving Ned some room, but he watches with keen interest as Ned undoes the hasps. The hinge creaks with a loud metallic whine as he lifts the top.

The trunk’s contents are covered by a fine silk shawl, something one might find the wardrobe of a wealthy woman. Ned plucks it from the chest and drapes it over his knees. He frowns as he fingers the dark fabric. He holds it up to the light, and Solomon can better see the crimson and pine inside its floral pattern.

Solomon taps the back of his knuckle on Ned’s shoulder. “Here, bring it closer to the fire.”

The trunk is heavy enough that both of them grab a handle to carry it across the room. In the better light, Solomon notices the intricate design scorched onto the leather exterior. It’s a mixture of curlicues and leaves, and while the edges are faded from time and travel, he assumes the chest was expensive when new.

“Which one of you came from money?” he asks with a low whistle. “You or Jopson?”

“The chest might have been a gift,” Ned points out. “Though I think it may be me.”

“I always assumed you were rich. You’re too much a dandy to not be.”

Ignoring the jab, Ned continues, “I’m starting to remember a house back in England. It had to be my family’s. It was too large for just me.” Solomon squares him with an inquisitive look. Ned’s face colors. “It’s only now that I remember that. I think the shawl was my mother’s.”

He opens the trunk again and picks up the shawl. He hands it to Solomon.

“I don’t know why I have it, though,” he says, voice trailing as his brain works. “She might be…”

He lapses into a solemn silence, no longer picking through the trunk’s contents. Solomon kneels beside him. He bumps their shoulders together, trying to get another smile out of Ned.

“It’s all right if you don’t remember,” he says. “It’s not like you’re trying to disrespect her memory on purpose, if she ends up being dead. She could also be alive and well. Either way, you don’t know.”

He folds the shawl and gives it back. Ned places it on his knee as he continues through the trunk. Near the top, there are a couple folded shirts. They are worn around the seams, but patched and mended, someone having painstakingly cared for them. Further inside, underneath a pair of brown trousers, is a toiletry kit; Ned opens it, revealing a shaving brush, razor, comb, amber bottles of oil and cologne. Otherwise there is nothing of interest, and Ned sets it aside. What catches Solomon’s eye is a velvet box which he opens to reveal a medal. Its bright face showcases the Queen in profile on one side and a ship on the other, the words _For Arctic Discoveries_ curving along the upper edge.

Solomon reads the date _1857_ aloud under his breath. “Bit old for you, isn’t it?”

Ned isn’t looking at him. He’s bent over the trunk, as he pulls at a tear in the lining.

“What are you doing?”

Ned doesn’t answer, and Solomon watches as he continues to pull the lining open. It doesn’t rip, except for the weak stitches holding it in place, and Ned is finally able to retrieve a bundle of papers and a well-loved copy of _Treasure Island_. He sets aside the papers, which Solomon picks up, turning over in his hands. They look like letters, tied together with a faded ribbon. He curiously begins to read where he sees the words _Eddy, my darling brother,_ but when Ned gasps softly beside him, he looks back at him.

The book lies open on Ned’s lap, to the first few pages where the title lays in bold print, but what draws Solomon’s eye is the handwritten inscription in the blank space between author and publisher.

_For my sweet and loving Ned — here’s to a lifetime of adventures, in pages or at sea. Let us hope the new world is more forgiving to men such as us. Yours, T._

Solomon's stomach drops. The inscription lies innocently on the yellowed paper, but for Solomon the sentences glow as accusatory as words on the wall, forcing him to face the truth that he knew when Jopson first arrived, saw Ned, said his full name, watched him leave with sorrow in his eyes, then turned that sorrow to anger when he looked at Solomon like a beast ready to kill.

Ned must know it, too. His eyes are wet, and after a shaky inhale, he gathers the letters and book in his hands. He shuts himself in the bedroom, and Solomon eats his meal alone.

⚒

The clock strikes ten, and Jopson still has not returned.

Solomon has filled the hours with as many empty tasks as he could muster: organizing and rationing their store of canned vegetables and dried meat in the cellar, fetching wood for the fire, cleaning out the animals' stalls whilst talking to them of the whole mess — most sympathy received from Tess and Tulip, none whatsoever from Cricket or the hens. On his solitary walk back from the barn (neptune remained in the cabin, asleep by the fire, his paws extended to the ceiling), Solomon braved the frigid temperature to stagger along the perimeter of the clearing.

As he did before, Solomon searched among the trees for any path Jopson might have taken or for any tracks in the snow, but same as the morning, he saw no abnormalities in the landscape. Were Solomon a more superstitious sort, he might have taken a fancy that Jopson was a ghost; that he had died in whatever skirmish he and Ned faced in the woods, that Ned were the luckier of the two to have been tangled in a trap and rescued; that maybe this Jopson fellow weren’t real at all but the combined and addled imaginings of two lonely men, one haunted by ghosts already and the other haunted by monsters and memories not his own.

The idea sent a shiver down Solomon’s spine unrelated to the cold, and he hurried past the garden plot and woodpile to the safety of the cabin. A hysterical desire to lock and bar the entrance rose unbidden in his chest, but he stomped it down. He reminded himself that there was nothing threatening to break down the door.

(not yet.)

Looking at the clock now and the starry night framed by the window, he considers stoking the fire, for whenever his strange and wayward guest decides to return. He tosses an extra log onto the grate and leaves it before joining Ned in the bedroom. Ned must have extinguished the bedside candle already, and once Solomon’s eyes adjust to the dark room, he can make out Ned’s shape under the quilt. He quickly undresses and slides under the covers behind him. When Ned sighs, stuck halfway between sleep and wakefulness, Solomon edges closer and kisses his neck, burying his face between his shoulders.

There is enough tension in Ned’s back that Solomon knows he is awake, but he cannot find the right words to say to Ned nor can he summon the bravery to ask the questions he wants answered. Sleep swells around him, and he continues to cling to Ned’s back as he plummets into a dreamless slumber.

⚒

No sound wakes him, but Solomon is instantly alert when he opens his eyes, as though a cold finger had drawn its icy touch down the side of his neck.

He wonders if it’s morning yet. He tries to calm the unsteady beat of his heart — dreams of that shining eye over the horizon fading to the back of his mind — and, after relieving himself in the chamber pot, leaves the bedroom. The clock reads half past six, what would be dawn at a more southerly latitude. The fire has died down, but nothing else in the room is disturbed. The trunk is where he and Ned left it. All the plates and cups lie unmoved on the shelf. Their mess of books and cards remain in a pile on the side table.

No phantoms here. Solomon sighs, dragging a hand over his face.

“Get a hold of yourself,” he grouses under his breath.

Kneeling by the hearth, he tries to spark new life in the embers, throwing some kindling on the grate and striking a flint over the tinder. He pauses when he feels a draft brush the back of his neck, gooseflesh prickling across the skin. He glances at each window, but all the curtains are closed, none moving in an unseen wind. Further investigation reveals that while the window panes themselves are frosted, a thin layer of condensation dripping down each, Solomon doesn’t find any gaps or cracks.

He feels the draft again, raising the fine hairs on his neck and forearms to attention. This time, he finds the source. The hatch to the loft is open, the tarp moved. With a frown, Solomon climbs the ladder.

The loft also appears untouched; though Solomon has shoved most of the canvas-covered shapes, broken furniture, rusted tools, and wagon wheels toward the back, so even he cannot properly judge whether anything has moved. Looking around, Solomon sees a glimmer of light peeking from between the boards over his head, so he climbs the second, shorter ladder into the tower. One of the rungs is rotted and breaks with a sickening crack. Solomon curses when his foot falls through, and the ladder sways beneath him.

He clings to the trapdoor until the ladder rests easy against the wall and he regains his footing. No longer trusting the ladder’s strength, he hauls himself through the trapdoor with his arms.

The paint room is changed, he realizes once his eyes adjust. Not cleaned; there is too much in the cramped space for it to ever resemble neatness, but someone has organized the paints and secured the lids on pigment jars, placing them on the two rickety shelves. Beneath them is a box where someone has stashed the cracked and broken jars. The two easels are folded and tucked into a corner, and the spare wood and canvas are separated into two stacks against the wall.

Solomon looks up and sees the same light through the final trapdoor leading into the uppermost room. A chill passes through him, and as he pulls the half-rotted ladder through the hole and props it against the paint room’s wall, he understands why the hermit installed a stove in the upper reaches. The ladder creaks under his weight, and he hesitates, glancing up at the trapdoor again. Above him, the light shifts, but he cannot hear the telltale creak of footsteps.

(for a heart-stopping second, solomon envisions the hermit inspecting his selection of pastoral and macabre paintings, the man hardly more than a mummified skeleton with sunken eyes and a long beard trailing on the uneven floor; how he will turn those milky eyes to solomon, his lips peeled and stretched, baring a yellow toothy grin as he asks in a dusty voice: _have you seen the wolves, lad?_ )

The image that greets him is quite different. He finds Jopson seated by the window. The source of light is as single candle, perched in its holder on top of the dark stove. Dressed down to his shirtsleeves, his coat hanging off the back of the chair, Jopson sits with a knee drawn up to his chin as he stares into the darkness outside. He ignores Solomon, though he must have heard him arrive.

He can see a quarter of Jopson’s face where the candle illuminates his jaw and the bridge of his nose. His eyes are as bright as when Solomon first saw them, but he is struck by the shine of them. Jopson’s cheeks are dry, but the sorrow is plain from the droop of his mouth to how tightly he holds his leg. Solomon averts his face, feeling clumsy and overly large for the room.

He clears his throat. “Sorry for no bed. Would have fixed something up for you, but we weren’t sure when you were coming back.”

Jopson sniffs, patting his collar and hair before lowering his leg to the floor and turning to Solomon.

“It is my fault, really, for not telling you when I would return.”

His back is ramrod straight, and a polite smile is plastered on his face. To a careless man, the expression might seem unassuming, but even as a stranger, Solomon sees the cracks in the veneer and _damn_ he wishes Jopson wouldn’t fix him with such a poised and calculated smile. He could handle one of Ned’s prolonged silences better than this foreign creature before him. At least Ned carries his emotions on his sleeve for all to see.

“Right,” Solomon says. “You want a fire at least? It’s freezing in here.”

“No need. I’m comfortable.”

“Fine.”

An overly long silence passes as Solomon closes the trapdoor behind himself and crouches by the wall, not quite sitting, not comfortable enough for that.

He lifts his eyes from the floor when he says, “ _Ned_ was your name for him, wasn’t it?”

The smile falters at last, though nothing of Jopson’s earlier anger appears.

“Did you come to that conclusion yourself, Mr. Solomon,” he asks, a hint of smoke and gravel in his otherwise polished voice, “or did something assist your revelation?”

“He found the book. The letters.”

Jopson perks. “And?”

Solomon squints at him, at the hope creeping into his eyes. “He didn’t remember everything all at once, if that’s what you’re after.” Jopson’s shoulders slump somewhat, but he bravely keeps his face turned to Solomon as he continues haltingly, “I think he remembers parts of you. That’s why he’s so goddamn hard on himself. Look, I know you don’t like me. That’s fine. But I wasn’t lying to you. Ned was messed up when I found him, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that I was able to save his life at all.”

Jopson laughs, the wet noise wavering between scoff and sob. “Are you a religious man then, talking of miracles?”

Solomon shrugs. “Hardly. But I have seen things here men would not believe. That counts for something.”

“I should thank you, instead of hurling accusations.” Jopson’s voice is increasingly thick, and he pauses to swallow, swiping at his face. “I’m glad…that he has had someone at his side. Someone that cares for him. I never would have thought — Not _here_ of all places, that we would find someone like—”

“Is that why you left England? For being,” Solomon hesitates, gesturing vaguely, “like that?”

Jopson laughs again, more subdued this time. “We left for many reasons, but…being men of a certain inclination was part of that, yes.” He looks to the window, breathes in deeply, releasing it in a long exhale. When he turns back, his smile is smaller but more sincere. “Why do you ask? Do you see something of yourself in that?”

“One of many reasons, like you said.”

By now, Solomon feels enough at ease to cross the room. He lowers himself to the floor, sitting cross-legged by the stove. He forces himself to hold Jopson’s gaze even when his stomach starts to twist and his face grows hot. Jopson peers questioningly at him for several long and silent seconds before resuming his earlier position, hugging one knee to his chest and resting his chin there.

“It’s horribly unfair, I’ve found.” He smiles again, a bitter ugly thing that thins his lips and indents his cheeks. “How violence has followed us wherever we go.”

The wind howls outside, rattling the stove’s chimney with a wail. The siding creaks, and Solomon swears that he can feel the tower rocking from the force. Jopson leans closer to the window, even though all Solomon can see past his shoulder is pitch darkness. Jopson puts his finger on the glass.

“It sounds like a storm is coming. A bad one.” He tilts his head, as his finger lightly drags through the frost on the window. “How well-provisioned are you?”

The question catches Solomon enough off guard that he isn’t offended by the implication that he is some amateur pioneer who doesn’t know his hand from his foot, nor tree from rock amidst the daunting Alaskan winter.

“We’re fine,” he says, puffing up a little. “We got a cellar full of canned goods. The man who lived here before had a decent stock.” Granted, he hardly trusts the cloudy jars of pickled turnips and berry jams. Lord knows how long they’ve sat under the cabin, covered in dust and dirt. “Caught a caribou late November, should last a few weeks more.”

He doesn’t take a third mouth into consideration, and that realization must show on his face because Jopson nods, removing his hand from the window.

“I won’t take advantage of your hospitality. I can help with hunting and bring in fresh meat for the rest of winter. I won’t have you thinking I can’t pull my own weight.”

“It’s winter and dark as hell out there.” Solomon thinks, adding, “I don’t have a second gun.”

Jopson’s eyes gleam at him, and he shrugs a single shoulder. “As charming as your reservations are, Mr. Solomon, they don’t matter.”

Solomon starts to argue some more, but Jopson flicks his hand.

“You should head downstairs,” he says, “You’re shivering.”

“We can start a fire in the stove.”

The _we_ hangs in the air as heavy as the snow outside. Jopson stares at him, his smile gone. Solomon feels a flush extending beyond his cheeks to his neck and chest, utterly confused with himself why he would say such a thing. He hopes that the candlelight is too dim to show the color in his face.

“I’ll be fine,” Jopson says. The corners of his lips quirk, and he schools his expression to something more serious; “I would hate to ask you repeat the trip up and down the ladders with firewood.” He turns back to the window, adding, “Besides, Edward is awake.”

Feeling chastised and unnerved, Solomon mutters, “Yeah, all right,” before standing — clenching his teeth at the ache in his knees and shinbones — and heads back down the ladder.

It’s not until he is in the loft that he hears the clanking of the pot on the stove accompanied by the splashing of water that he realizes that Jopson was right. Ned _is_ awake. He certainly couldn’t hear him from the tower and wonders how the hell Jopson could.

Solomon descends into the parlor to find Ned bustling about the kitchen making coffee. He must still be frowning by the time Ned pours him a cup because when Ned slides it across the table to him, he covers the top of his hand with his own, gently squeezing. The pressure of Ned’s hand is enough to break Solomon’s convoluted thoughts. The sight of Ned, fresh-faced and cheerful, is also a great relief to him, and he raises Ned’s knuckles to his lips and savors the smile his kiss elicits. Whatever Ned discovered about himself in the book or in the letters has not removed the man from him, and Solomon feels an enormous weight lift off his shoulders.


	7. On Memory and Madness

**Winter, 1900.**

****

Jopson disappears again. Solomon isn’t sure when he left. One moment he was in the tower — this, Solomon could see by the glow of the candle in the tower window while he walked to the barn — but on the way back, he noticed the light was extinguished. He half expected to find Jopson in the parlor, but Ned was alone by the fire with Neptune, having seen no sign of their guest.

Ned looks away from Solomon whenever they speak of Jopson; as though the name itself is a reminder of all his shortcomings. Solomon pats his knee and assures him that if Jopson had survived in the woods this long, a couple more nights wouldn’t hurt him.

“He’s the capable sort. Hardy.” Despite Jopson’s mild appearance, Solomon recognizes that there is some unspeakable quality about him which leaves little room for argument. “He’ll be fine.”

Later the same day (perhaps the same day, perhaps only hours, perhaps a year has passed since jopson last was here), a loud knock shakes the door. Neptune immediately starts barking, but before either Ned or Solomon can investigate, Jopson calls through the door.

“I’ve brought back a bear. Where do you want to store it?”

A _bear_? Solomon’s mouth hangs open before he jumps to his feet.

He raps his knuckles against the inside of the door, one hand grabbing his coat from its hook.

“Take it to the barn,” he tells Jopson. “I’ll join you.”

Ned looks up from where he is peeling and cutting up weeks-old parsnips at the counter.

“Do you think he’ll join us for supper?”

Solomon shrugs as he pulls on his coat, muffler, boots, and hat. “Don’t reckon if I know. Man’s an odd one.”

With a nod, Ned drops his eyes to the counter. He’s frowning when he wipes his cheek with the back of his hand, and a sliver of parsnip clings to his beard. It’s a charming sight, and Solomon’s feet carry him across the room so he may pluck it from his face. When Ned starts, he grins and kisses the skin above where the parsnip was caught. Ned blinks, his mind returning from far away. His hands come to rest at Solomon’s hips, and Solomon kisses him properly this time, returning Ned’s loose embrace. He can’t rid himself of this nagging fear that if he doesn’t keep touching Ned, that he might disappear; that he’ll wake one morning to find his bed empty and cold as though this whole winter were nothing more than an extended dream, a snowy paradise on borrowed time; that there was never anyone else, no man but Solomon and his aching, howling loneliness.

Ned leans into the second kiss, holding him tight, and the embrace is enough to anchor Solomon and banish his fear for a few blissful seconds.

“I’ll be right back,” he whispers against Ned’s lips, hesitant to pull away.

“I’ll set a third place at the table,” Ned says.

“All right.”

One more kiss, and Solomon extracts himself to button his coat and adjust his hat. A faint smile hides in the corner of Ned’s mouth, and that alone warms Solomon far more than fire or fur. It’s that kind of warmth that sustains him as he walks into the darkness and plods toward the barn. That warmth loosens the knot in his stomach, helping him forget the solitary rifle where it lies under a thin coat of dust, unused and untouched since the last full moon.

⚒

He lets out a low whistle when he sees the bear. The grizzly is male and quite plump from its winter preparation. It’s a wonder that Jopson was able to drag the creature back to the homestead, with no rope and no sign of a handmade sledge. The bear’s head lolls to one side where the bone is snapped. A quick death, looks like.

“I feel a bit guilty,” Jopson admits as he wipes his hands, adding with a nod to the bear, “It’s hardly fair to ambush him when he’s sleeping.”

Solomon shrugs, folding his arms across his chest. “We do what we have to, especially here.”

With a tilt of his head, Jopson contemplates the bear, and likewise, Solomon cannot help but stare at Jopson. He has removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves, revealing strong forearms, and while the barn is warmer than outside (doesn’t take much for that), there is a distinct chill in the air. Jopson seems unperturbed by the cold. He’s breathing hard from moving the bear, his hair falling over his eyes in a windswept mess, but his face remains pale, no flush gracing his cheeks.

In the back of his mind, Solomon might think Jopson a handsome man. Even more, he thinks he understands how _Ned_ might find Jopson handsome.

He tears his gaze away and yanks off his coat, wincing when a few threads rip at the shoulder. Jopson appears unaware of Solomon’s quandary. He prods the bear’s meaty shoulder with his boot and raises his eyebrows at Solomon with a smile.

“And what now, Mr. Solomon?”

Solomon crouches by the bear, trying to gauge where it would be best to grab it. The creature is massive, and he cannot determine the shape of muscle or skeleton beneath its bulk. Jopson suggests dragging it by the front paws, and Solomon agrees. He grunts as he tries to shoulder one of the bear’s paws. It is only when Jopson grabs the other paw that the weight lessens significantly. Jopson takes the lead, navigating them across the barn to the room where Solomon had hung and butchered the caribou. His foot snags on the doorjamb, and when he catches himself on the table, the bear splays across the floor between them with a thud.

The cramped space is hardly more than a cupboard, and the surrounding walls creep closer with the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder over the bear.

“You’re stronger than you look,” Solomon says with a panting grin.

Jopson returns the smile, pushing some of his unruly fringe from his face. “So I’ve been told.”

They lapse into silence; Solomon staring down at the bear and Jopson averting his eyes toward the crossbeams overhead.

“So, I’ll get him ready,” Solomon mumbles and nods. “Should be plenty of meat for a while.”

“Good.” Jopson takes a half-step forward. “Do you need to suspend it?”

“No, it’d break the hook. The table’s fine.”

“Would you like—”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine. Thank—”

“Not at all.”

Solomon’s face is flaming red by the end of the uncomfortable dance where they avoid stomping on each other’s feet, his back griping when he has to contort himself to lift the bear’s weight in the tiny space, but after some huffing and hawing, they succeed in slinging the bear onto the table. The wood creaks, the legs on the right bowing as though they could pop in half in the blink of an eye. Solomon shoves himself against the table, hooking his palms under the side, the coarse wood jamming into his belly.

“Damn huge son of a bitch,” he mutters and lets go, once he’s certain the table won’t fall apart.

Beside him, Jopson chuckles but says nothing. Solomon refuses to look at him, scared how he might react to that enigmatic smile and those cunning eyes.

Grabbing his knife, he cuts slits on the inside of each leg and a longer slit down the bear’s belly. Disemboweling is quick, if messy work, and Jopson is attentive enough to retrieve a bucket to catch the entrails. Otherwise, he keeps his distance and watches Solomon work, seemingly fascinated by the process. Solomon dips his head forward, focusing on the work and ignoring how much Jopson’s scrutiny makes his hands shake.

“You should save the skin,” Thomas says.

“What, head and all? Think it’ll make a good rug?” Solomon asks with a snort.

Jopson rolls his eyes and finally walks away. “Do what you want, but whether you keep the fur or sell it, it could be useful.” He crosses his arms over his chest, nearly hugging himself. Perhaps the cold affects him more than Solomon thought. He leans against the doorway, peering at the ancient wood of the barn, the knobs in the grain, and the off-color cream of the chinking. “Have you lived here long, Mr. Solomon?”

He almost misses the question, as he slides more innards into the bucket with a loud plop. “Since summer.”

“Only?” Jopson says, surprise in his voice and on his face. “You seem like such a seasoned frontiersman.”

“I learned a lot as I went. You _have_ to, if you want to survive.”

The reality of it is that Solomon witnessed many failed attempts; whether it was prospectors who died of starvation and dysentery; entire families thrown onto the street in the boomtowns; others who were scalped of their pitiable savings as soon as they arrived in port, with no work or gold to save them from their misery, their only consolation being that most who took advantage of newcomers often wound up the victims of vigilantes and were knifed in saloons or gunned down in the street.

He adds with a shrug, “Those who had money might pay their way and make things easier, but most of us learn to look after our own hides.”

Unwanted, Cornelius’s face comes to mind. Solomon closes his eyes, pausing in his work. The image of Cornelius with his cruel smile transforms into something softer, a private vision of him that Solomon likes to think was his and his alone; waking alongside Cornelius in their tent by the river as they traveled from camp to camp; the mornings where Cornelius was pliant and his voice rough with sleep, and they would either fuck in their dew-damp bedrolls or Cornelius would hold him against his chest, run his fingers through his hair, and hum a vague tune that threatened to lull Solomon back to dreams.

He lets out a rough sigh and forces his eyes back open.

Jopson is watching him. He has wandered to the cows’ stall, one hand rubbing the side of Tulip’s neck, but Solomon sees his head turned toward him, his keen eye appraising him.

“You make it sound so cutthroat,” he says lightly.

Solomon straightens and finishes pulling away the last of the bear’s fur.

“It’s not all bad,” he says, hating himself for being too weak to keep the warble from his voice. “My mate Bill met his wife in Dawson City. They’ve settled and are already expecting. I’ve met good men and women on the trail, some who’ve made their own tiny fortunes. Others who didn’t, but fell in love with the land, the people, and decided to stay anyway.”

Jopson nods, continuing to pet Tulip. “And how would you define yourself, Mr. Solomon? The disillusioned prospector or reformed homesteader?”

Solomon laughs, the shock of it bursting from his chest. He stabs his knife into the table before he hangs the fur to dry and wipes his hands clean. He shrugs, brave enough to meet Jopson’s eye.

“You tell me,” he says, the challenge clear in his voice.

“I barely know you,” Jopson counters with a scoff, but the smile remains on his face as he moves past Tulip to give Tess equal attention.

There is another long, loaded silence. Jopson sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, a gesture similar to one Solomon has seen Ned do countless times. The sight makes his heart clench, but Jopson’s voice is gentle enough to wade through his sudden anxiety.

“I think you’re the romantic type,” he says; “Like the hardened hero of an adventure novel. Maybe people don’t see it at first and don’t get past your rough exterior, but—” Here, he raises his eyes, a close-lipped smile on his face, a questioning look to his eye. “You love it here, don’t you?”

Solomon feels stripped naked, as though Jopson took scissors and snipped away all his barriers and defenses, leaving him exposed. He clears his throat and nods, turning back to the bear.

“I like it, all right,” he says weakly, dislodging his knife from the table.

Jopson makes a noncommittal noise behind him.

“Do you need more help, Mr. Solomon?” he asks, voice changed somehow, closed off, more formal.

Solomon doesn’t look up. “No, I’ve got the rest.”

Repeating the same noise, Jopson moves toward the door. He dons his coat.

“I’ll head inside then.”

Paranoia stabs his belly (how much he fears the two of them being alone in the cabin without him), but still, Solomon keeps his face down. He gave away too much as it is, and damn it all, what induced him to say such _foolish_ things?

Instead he says, “Ned’s finishing up supper. I’ll join you both in a bit.”

The only answer he gets is the door pulling open and a waft of frigid air. His ears pop when the door seals shut again.

“Damn it, damn it, _damn it,”_ he mutters in time with his jabs into the bear’s meat. His fingers ache from where he grips the knife’s handle, skin blistering along his palm, the spark of pain enough to help clear his head.

⚒

Solomon returns to the cabin, pausing on the stoop to kick snow off his boots. Through a gap in the curtain, he notices Jopson and Ned sitting at the kitchen table, their heads bowed close together. He knows he shouldn’t stay hidden, but he cannot help but stay a moment and watch. Between the dinner plates, they’ve arranged the letters Ned found in the trunk. Tears leak from Ned’s eyes, which he wipes futilely with his hand until Jopson offers him a handkerchief. When Ned hides his watery eyes behind the handkerchief, Jopson gently pries his hands from his face, cupping Ned’s cheek. Solomon stumbles away from the window. His heart beats hard in his chest, and he stomps his feet on the steps as though just arriving from the barn.

He opens the door to find Jopson sitting alone, neatening the pile of letters. Ned stands by the stove where he retrieves the whistling kettle.

Without looking up, Jopson nods at the wash basin. “There’s warm water for washing. You likely need it.”

Solomon glares at the back of his head as Jopson retreats toward the fire, replacing the letters within the trunk. Ned is subdued as he brews tea, and the lid of the teapot slips from his hand, clattering on the counter. It doesn’t break, but the noise makes him flinch. Jopson is at his side in an instant.

“Tom, I’m sorry. I’m not—”

Jopson shushes him. “It’s fine, Edward. Sit down. I’ll handle the tea.”

Solomon continues glaring as he shoves his hands into the basin. He picks at the dirt and blood caked into his knuckles and under his nails, satisfied when the water clouds with the filth. He’s much calmer when he joins Ned at the table. Ned hands him a plate of food, and he immediately digs in, anything to continue distracting himself from Jopson’s presence and the vague sadness radiating off Ned.

Jopson brings the tea to the table, pouring himself a cup, but he otherwise makes no move to sit down with them. He walks away to refill the kettle with water and puts it on to boil.

With a frown, Solomon asks, “You’re not eating?”

Jopson almost ignores him. As he empties the basin’s used water into a bucket, he says as an afterthought, “I’m not hungry, thank you.” He waits until the kettle whistles to pour the steaming water into the basin, and he carries it toward the hearth, sitting in such a way that the armchairs block him from view. He briefly goes to the trunk and removes a clean shirt before he returns to the hearth and disappears from sight again.

Ned has barely touched his food. Solomon extends a couple fingers and brushes the back of his hand. Ned flinches at the contact, but his features soften when he meets Solomon’s worried look.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine.” He picks at his food and chews thoughtfully. “It’s just… I’m remembering more, all at once, and it’s been a bit much. More from London and my time with the merchant navy, but… So much is missing. It’s like I have the book, and only half the pages are filled. I have the beginning and middle, but the back is just pages. Empty.”

Jopson’s voice floats to them. “You remember Skagway, don’t you?”

Ned starts at Jopson’s question, frowning.

“Pieces of it,” he says. A smile suddenly grows on his face. “I remember a man trying to sell you a mule for an obscene price. You looked ready to spit in his face.”

Solomon leans back in his chair, far enough that he catches a glimpse of Jopson. He’s stripped bare to the waist while he scrubs at flecks of blood off the collar of his shirt. The second, clean shirt sits folded beside him.

“Who’s to say I didn’t spit in his face, Ned?” he asks with a snort, smiling at the memory himself.

He picks up his cup of tea, and he sees Solomon watching. Embarrassed at being caught, he starts to sit forward again, but the same boldness that struck him in the barn overcomes him again. He holds Jopson’s gaze for as long as Jopson drinks from his cup.

Keeping his eyes firmly locked on Solomon, Jopson continues teasingly, “Your memory isn’t as reliable as it used to be, Edward. For all you know, I might have thrown that man to the dogs.”

His tone is flippant, and Solomon is surprised to hear Ned laugh at the gentle ribbing. He tips back forward, the legs of the chair scraping against the floor.

“So you two arrived in Alaska together?” he says to Ned. “You remember that?”

“Hardly. It’s more in snatches than anything else.” Ned wets his lips, glancing up at Solomon with shyness, perhaps regret. “But I remember Thomas at sea. We sailed on several voyages together, and— We were close.”

Jopson shuffles behind the chairs, and when he stands, he is wearing the clean shirt, the untucked hem hanging halfway down his thighs. He drapes the damp shirt over the back of a chair and stands facing it with his hands on his hips.

“You might as well tell him the whole truth, Edward,” he urges, “It won’t do you any good to keep that secret.”

Ned visibly swallows and pushes the food around on his plate with the fork.

“I’d rather not be… You can tell him.”

“It needs to come from you.”

Solomon’s own appetite retreats to some far away plain, replaced by nausea from the nerves twisting inside him.

“We were lovers,” Ned says after a lengthy pause. “Thomas and I. Even on ship, as foolhardy as that is. When I retired, we came here. To Alaska.”

Solomon already knew that, even if it were a truth he wanted to ignore. He glances at Jopson after Ned’s confession, but he seems utterly unconcerned as he pinches the edge of the damp shirt, frowning at a loose thread in the stitching. Solomon wishes he could have had this conversation with Ned alone, but when he returns his attention to Ned, he’s stopped short by his hopeful gaze, chin pointed down, eyes peeking from behind his eyelashes, and goddamn if that isn’t a look that has Solomon weak at the knees, and he knows he’s about to break someone’s heart or be heartbroken himself. He doesn’t think he has the strength to do either, not with Ned looking at him like that, not with Ned’s hand coming to rest on his knee under the table.

He clears his throat, pushing his plate aside. “This change things?”

Ned looks down again, and it is Jopson who answers for him.

“It doesn’t have to.”

⚒

Some of Solomon’s composure returns after supper, but Ned is antsy: a nervous energy making his voice tremble when he reminds Solomon that the cabin is his home, and that _we shan’t invade your house any longer than we are welcome._ The words cut Solomon to the bone, but he tries to placate Ned, setting his hand on the small of his back. Ned leans into the touch, a silent sigh moving through him.

“I’m not planning on kicking you out any time soon,” Solomon says. “Not in the middle of winter.”

The future can wait. The first sunrise is weeks away, and any form of a thaw weeks after that.

The hesitance follows Ned through the evening, so when he readies himself for the night, he enters the bedroom — Neptune on his heels — only to backtrack into the parlor with a blushing frown on his face. Solomon raises his eyes from where he’s attempting to whittle a piece of kindling into a bear. Jopson is at the kitchen table mending the ripped hem of his shirt.

His hands held stiffly at his side, Ned stands in the middle between Solomon and Jopson; unsure which one he should go to, unsure what to say to either of them.

Solomon takes pity on him and his indecision.

“Way I see it, it’s as much your bedroom as mine.” Solomon avoids looking at Jopson when he tells Ned this. “Sleep where you’re comfortable.”

Neptune seems to agree as he scratches at the bedroom door with a huff, and Ned sends another glance toward Jopson who encourages him without looking up; “I’ll be fine, Edward. Don’t worry about me.”

When Ned continues to hesitate, Jopson raises his head and gives him that same strangely sad smile that he did the day he arrived; hidden somewhere in the corners of his eyes and his mouth is the silent assurance that _all is well_.

Ned nods and goes to the bedroom without a word, patting Neptune’s head on the way. As soon as the bedroom door clicks shut, the smile falls from Jopson’s face. He resumes stitching.

Solomon tosses aside the wood. It looks more like a misshapen carriage with paws than any sort of bear. He considers throwing it into the fire, let the kindling serve its original purpose. A quiet hiss from Jopson draws his eye, and he looks over in time to see Jopson nursing his forefinger in his mouth, a deep dent in his cheek growing as he frowns at the floor.

Looking away, Solomon offers to sleep by the fireplace.

“I can stay out of yours and Ned’s way. Chair’s comfortable enough, and I can keep the fire going. Keep the cabin warmer that way.”

Jopson harrumphs before he pulls the thread to his mouth and bites off the stitch. He folds the shirt over his arm as he stands.

“Don’t make me use your own words, Mr. Solomon,” he says, delicately stepping around him to return the shirt to the trunk. “I also have no intention of keeping you from your own bed.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“Like you said, the chair’s comfortable.”

Solomon would spend more time arguing for the sake of it, but he also realizes that he’s not quite willing to give up sharing a bed, with a lover or otherwise. It’s warm; it’s practical; and he sleeps better that way. He rises with a groan, saying offhandedly that he’ll grab extra blankets for him. Solomon is quiet as he enters the bedroom, relieved to see the usual shape of Ned under the blanket and Neptune curled on top. He grabs two heavy quilts from the cupboard and hurries back, avoiding the floorboards that creak.

He returns to the parlor and drops the blankets onto the chair. Jopson stands in front of the side table, holding the novel Ned was reading earlier. He flips through the pages, stopping on one section and reading a few lines before chuckling to himself. Solomon crosses his arms, shoving his hands under his armpits. Curious, he tilts his head enough to see the title on the spine.

 _Gulliver’s Travels,_ the faded gold lettering declares. It’s another one of the books that came with the house, and Solomon says as much.

“Have you read it before?” he asks Jopson.

“No,” Jopson says, shaking his head as he passes the chairs and sets the book back on the shelf. “I know a little of the story and its Lilliputians and giants, but no, I’ve never read it. Never had much time for reading back home.”

With that, he runs his finger along the small selection of other books. Solomon apologizes for the sparse selection, which earns him another laugh.

“Heaven forbid you didn’t drag a library out here,” Jopson says.

He tugs out a thin volume, and its binding adheres to its neighbor, causing the thick black book to hurtle to the floor where it lands with a heavy thud. Jopson blinks in surprise, and when he bends to pick it up, he opens it.

“A Bible,” he says, closing it again and examining the nondescript cover. “I wouldn’t have guessed.” He turns a couple pages, a confused smile growing on his face. He glances at Solomon. “I thought you said you weren’t religious, Mr. Solomon.”

“I’m not,” Solomon says.

Jopson hands him the Bible. It’s a chapter early in the Old Testament. There are notes scribbled in the margins, the pencil too faded to make out most words. Individual verses are underlined or, alternatively, blacked out.

With a snort, Solomon says that he doesn’t think the Bible’s owner was much too religious either, if he interpreted the good book so liberally. Jopson laughs with him and takes the Bible back. He flips through it again, where he discovers more words hastily scratched out. At some point, the writer replaced their pencil with ink, and the smudges are darker, fiercer. Some are thick enough that they’re visible through the thin pages. Other slashes are strong enough to have ripped through the paper.

Jopson pauses, staring at the one visible paragraph on a page otherwise completely blacked out.

“Who lived here before you, Solomon?” he asks, voice calm despite the mounting horror on his face.

Solomon doesn’t answer. He looks over Jopson’s shoulder at the page. The entire sheet is painted black with ink, except for small windows that encircle words scattered across the page: _he went up from thence…_ [a scratch of ink] … _there came forth little children out of the city and mocked him…_ [more ink blotting the words] … _he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them…_ [black] … _there came forth…_ [nothing] … _bears out of the wood and tore forty and two children of them_.

He thinks of the bear in the barn and represses a shudder.

“It was no one,” he says. “Just an old man. He lived here by himself. Then he died.”

Jopson turns to the next page where the paper is comparably clean. The writer — the old man, who else — drew an animal in the corner; a tiny, crude silhouette of a wolf.

He turns the page. There are more wolves, drawn close together, fighting and snarling at each other.

He turns the page. Red paint joins the ink, and the old man haphazardly dotted and smeared the page with red as the wolves grew in size and number.

Solomon holds his breath.

Jopson turns the page.

No more wolves, and Solomon sighs. His relief is short-lived, however, as Jopson notes that this page looks darker than the rest. There must be another illustration. Solomon braces himself for something gruesome.

Jopson turns the page.

It’s the trees. Tall and ominous, their branches spread to all four corners of the pages as though the treetops threatened to burst from the leather binding of the book.

And among the black spires, piercing the shadows, are hundreds of eyes; inhuman, red, legion, and unblinking.

⚒

The moon glows bright and solitary in the night sky, spilling her light over the woods, and though Solomon can see nothing among the trees, he cannot know if something there sees him _;_ that under the treacherous moonlight, he is exposed, and any creature lurking in the woods would be harbored and camouflaged by the trees.

He closes the curtains, turning his back to the window and the woods.

The fear lingers as he lies in bed. Neptune’s solid weight on his feet grounds him, but it does not lessen his worry. He continues tossing and turning, and at some small hour after midnight, he slides toward the middle of the mattress, seeking Ned’s heat and the solid presence of his body. Ned stirs as Solomon hugs him from behind, but he does not wake.

Jopson’s question drifts through his mind; _Who lived here before you?_

He wracks his brain, trying to remember.

It was just an old man. A lonely, bereaved old man.

A lonely old man—

His wife had died, so they said, so Bill had said—

_Who lived here before you…_

Mr. Horne kept glancing toward the tree line when he showed Solomon the cabin. They sold the property as-is.

_Do you farm, Mr. Tozer?_

Solomon cut him off mid-sentence to say he’d buy the property, and Horne bent as comically as a willow branch, thanking him profusely.

_Oh, excellent, excellent, you will not regret this, Mr. Tozer!_

Horne kept looking at the trees with a nervous grin. His palms were wet when they shook hands. Solomon waited until he was turned away to wipe his fingers on his trousers.

_Who lived here before…_

Solomon dreams in black and white. He walks through knee-deep trails carved into the snow, up the embankments and impossibly steep mountains. A smattering of gray mars the pristine surface of the snow, and he follows it until he finds a pair of goats strung up among the trees by their hind legs. Their mouths hang open, tongues dangling. Their throats are slashed, the blood frozen in long, murky icicles.

_Who lived…_

The paintings sit untouched inside the tower. Solomon will not move them. Even unflappable Bill looked mighty uncomfortable as he handled each canvas. But he had his family to think of, so he left Solomon at the mercy of winter and of whatever else lurked in the trees, behind boulders and snow.

_Do you have a wife, Mr. Tozer? My Annabelle and I would…_

In his dream, he walks past the slaughtered goats, for the trail of blood continues up the hill. The snow grows deeper until he is walking through a narrow hollow, both sides high enough that he cannot see over them. He hollers up ahead, but no sound leaves him. He screams until the trees shake, and the pebbles tremble on the ground. His throat burns, but still no sound leaves him.

He keeps walking, the moon guiding him as the snow towers over his head now. Ahead of him, he sees a shadowed figure bent in the path, and his heart begins to race. His feet continue walking on their own, and Solomon realizes as he draws near that Ned lies in the center of the path, stiff and bloodless, his chest carved open. The figure over him snaps their head at Solomon with inhuman speed, but all Solomon sees is a brief glimpse of black eyes and red, red, red, re…

The ground opens beneath him, and he plummets. He jolts awake in bed, drenched in sweat, breath coming in rapid gasps. The room is dark; no moon, fire, or candle. The cabin is quiet and at rest. Ned sighs deeply in his sleep and turns into Solomon, his cheek pressing into his shoulder.

Already, he is forgetting the dream, and his panic subsides. He tightens his hold on Ned, trying to remember what spooked him. Their legs tangle together, making Neptune shift at the foot of the bed. He kisses Ned’s forehead and closes his eyes.

Though if he sleeps, he cannot say. The next hours are empty and dreamless, and he is spared a second sojourn to that bleak and bloody landscape.

⚒

A fragile peace forms around the three of them, and same as Ned did, Jopson joins the household with no fanfare.

Jopson himself is strange, Solomon accepts. He has never seen him sleep, though he frequently is wrapped in blankets by the fire when Solomon wakes and staggers from the bedroom. He helps with a variety of chores before either Solomon or Ned asks him, and he regularly supplies them with chopped wood and fresh meat.

Neither the letters nor the inscribed book make a reappearance, and Solomon lets the memory of them fade. He has worse anxieties on the horizon with the month progressing onward and the moon growing larger in the sky. Several times, he has tried to bring up the wolves to Jopson, but the man dances around the topic. Solomon is unable to resent him for it. He remembers the fear on Jopson’s face when he saw the drawings in the Bible, how he had shoved the book back onto the shelf without another word. Solomon may be running out of time, but he also dares not disturb their peace.

One morning, Jopson is not at his usual spot in front of the hearth, but Solomon thinks nothing of it. Jopson comes and goes as he pleases, with the unspoken understanding that he will always come back, be it hours or a day later. Thus, when Solomon is returning from the barn with a pail of fresh milk and he sees the vague outline of a figure standing at the tree line, he knows it is not Ned, and he doesn’t think it is Jopson.

At first he thinks it’s a trick of the eyes, but the shadowed person is marginally darker than the surrounding trees. When it moves, terror strikes Solomon as violently as lightning, and the pail slips from his lax grip, the milk melting the snow where it lands and freezing only seconds later.

He curses at himself for leaving the gun in the cabin.

(he has never needed the gun for the short walk to the barn.)

“Who’s there?” he shouts at the figure.

The pale face that turns to him is monstrous, as colorless as the snow, the skin stretched taut like a corpse, and the eyes gaping pits that bore into him. Its mouth and hands are red. Solomon’s breath catches in his throat. He stumbles back, the corners of his vision swimming.

He makes it just inside the barn, but before he can close the door behind him, everything goes black.

He wakes only seconds later — or what feels like seconds. The barn door is shut, and the lantern is lit again. He lies near the cow’s stall with straw cushioning his head. When he tries to sit up, his head throbs, and he feels bile creeping up his throat. He falls back onto the straw with a groan.

“Careful.” Jopson kneels beside him. His hand is cool on Solomon’s forehead. “I found you sprawled in the snow. You’re lucky I came by when I did.”

“When?” Solomon asks, the single word difficult to say through the haze of pain and nausea.

Jopson frowns. “I haven’t any idea of the time. I pulled you in here a few minutes ago.”

Everything above the neck feels ready to explode, and Solomon forgets the details of what made him ill. He remembers something black, ( _red_ ), that filled him with so much dread that he longs for the springtime sun. Hell, even the moon will suffice.

The moon.

He forces his eyes open, asking Jopson to help him stand. Jopson is reluctant, but Solomon insists that if he’s going to start fainting, he’d rather do it someplace nicer and warmer than the barn.

“I’ll carry you,” Thomas insists, “if walking is too difficult.”

His hands are strong where he holds Solomon, and he doesn’t doubt that Jopson could throw him over his shoulder with ease.

“No, no, your arm’s enough.”

The air outside nips at the bare skin peeking above Solomon’s muffler, and he clenches his teeth as he shuffles forward. Jopson interlocks their arms, and Solomon feels less exposed with him by his side. When he looks toward the trees, there is no inhuman silhouette watching them; no red-mouthed, black-eyed corpse lurking in the shadows.

Jopson holds his elbow tighter as they climb the stoop’s shallow stairs. Vertigo grips Solomon, and for a brief moment, he feels like he’s tumbling backward off the steps, beyond the snow, dragged toward the trees, as though some unseen force is beckoning — _begging_ — him come.

The sensation passes, and he finds himself facing Jopson, clutching his forearms and breathing hard. He looks at Jopson, and in a blink, he can picture his face covered by the one he saw at the trees, like a mask made from his own skin. But Jopson’s wide eyes are pale and bright, his cheeks too full to belong to the skeletal phantom.

Once he’s regained his balance, and they retreat into the cabin, Solomon asks what’s been bothering him for days now, “Say, how did you take down that bear by yourself?”

Jopson blinks, the question clearly catching him off-guard.

The door shuts behind him. He pulls down the latch. In all the months he’s lived here, Solomon has never pulled down the latch.

Jopson lapses into a long, thoughtful silence, and Solomon begins to think he won’t get his answer. He goes to the fireplace where Ned dozes in one of the chairs with his feet propped on the hearth and an open book lying face-down on his lap.

“The throat,” comes Jopson’s voice as though uttered from the next room. “You attack the throat.”


	8. A Full Moon, Pt 2

**Winter, 1900.**

Solomon tracks the moon’s phases with the almanac, its many uses rendering the book stained, ripped, dog-eared, and broken. He further ruins it by scribbling on the pages, making a note of future dates in the margins and on the calendar. The next full moon approaches, and Solomon is at a loss for what to do for Ned, short of binding him with rope and chain to the wall.

Outside, the moon is almost a perfectly round disk. She cares naught for Solomon’s indecision and grows more brilliant with each passing night.

(ned must know it, too, but he says nothing; talking of anything but the moon and his ailment; though solomon has caught him peeking more than once out the window at the night sky.)

In silence and solitude, Solomon broods. He waits for the moon.

⚒

If the first time were an earthquake, rumbling deep from within the bowels of the earth, powerful enough to rend metal and stone — then the second time is as unassuming as a late summer breeze, never a source of worry until it ushers clouds black as coal, a storm as thunderous as a stampede trampling close on its heels.

It comes at night. 

(it always does).

It is such a quiet and faceless thing that Solomon nearly sleeps through it. When he wakes, it’s as gentle as a lover touching his arm and whispering into his ear _solomon_. With a sigh, he turns onto his side, ready to fall asleep again when the floorboards creak by the window.

The noise is loud as church bells in the silence, and Solomon flinches, reacting by instinct as he sits up, the quilt sliding to his waist.

Ned stands by the window with his back to Solomon. He is completely motionless, head hanging low, shallow breaths hunching his shoulders. The moon shines through the open curtains, outlining his silhouette in bright silver. Ned must have opened them, he realizes. Solomon always shuts them when they go to bed, lest they allow the woods’ thousand creatures peer into their home at their vulnerable sleeping bodies, the animals scratching and prodding at the walls for any weakness, any crack. Solomon rubs at his eyes, the strange images of forest bogeyman fading as he grows more alert.

His eyes adjust to the moonlight, and he can make out the lurid spirals and coils of aurora over Ned’s shoulder. Ned is silent, rapidly breathing and swaying slightly from side to side.

“Ned?” Solomon swallows. “Ned, is something wrong?” A ridiculous question, he knows. Their peace is about to crumble into dust around him, but he hopes that he can at least break the trance that has a hold of Ned, that Ned might turn to him, his eyes clear and lucid, that he’ll smile at Solomon and say something back.

Instead, he closes the curtains, plunging the room into darkness, and briskly walks out the bedroom.

All sleep is gone from Solomon’s mind. He rips the blankets off himself, retrieving whatever clothes he stripped off the evening before. As he shoves his arms through his flannel shirt, Neptune and Jopson rouse in the next room. The dog’s whining up a storm, and somewhere over the commotion of Solomon shoving his feet into half-laced boots and slamming his hip against the side of the wardrobe, he hears Jopson murmur a quavering, “Edward?”

By the time Solomon reaches the other room, Ned stands by the door with his hands on the latch. Jopson has a tight hold on his arm, his face tight with worry.

“Edward, look at me,” he says, his voice a low and single note, like he’s trying to talk down a spooked animal. “You can’t go outside. It’s dangerous out there.”

Ned pulls at his hair. A high-pitched groan careens from his open mouth, his teeth clenched and bared. Most of the noises that leave him are wordless; wheezy gasps of air, broken up by sobs and pained moans. Amid the whines, while Jopson rubs his shoulders and neck, Ned chokes out a disjointed, garbled sentence.

“They’re here again, Tommy, they’re back they’re back dear god they’re—”

A spasm seizes him, and with a scream, Ned falls to his knees. Jopson wraps his arm around his middle, attempting to haul him back to his feet, but Ned yells and shoves him back. Jopson collides with the kitchen table, grunting when the sharp edge rams into his low back. He says Ned’s name, holding one palm out, ready to grab him at a moment’s notice as he inches forward. Solomon creeps closer as well, and when Jopson glances back at him, he’s struck by how terrified he looks. His face is paler than usual, eyes wide, lips pinched into a flat line.

“Help me stop him, please,” he says to Solomon, his voice so soft that it barely carries over the inhuman shrieks tumbling from Ned.

A vision of black fur and canine teeth smeared in blood crosses Solomon’s mind.

He nods. “He’ll try the door again. Hold him back, and I’ll get between him and it.”

Jopson drops into a crouch and stretches his hand toward Ned as he crawls near him. Ned doesn’t notice. His head hangs as he gags and heaves. He rakes his fingers across the floorboards with every moan that slumps from him. One of his nails is ripped from where it’s caught the wood, and blood smears in a messy line every time Ned drags his hands. Between the spasms and the sobs, he’s still insisting that _someone’s here they’ve found us tom tommy please._

Keeping on the balls of his feet, Solomon circles around Ned. He glances at the gun on the shelf. It’s too far to reach from the door, and he doesn’t figure he’d get to it in time if Ned saw him go for it.

 _What the hell are you gonna do with a gun —_ his mind spits at him — _shoot him?_

God knows he can’t. His name falls from Ned’s lips as often as Jopson’s while Ned sobs and gags. Solomon’s eyes meet Jopson’s over his shoulder, and once he is in reach, they advance at the same time, Solomon grabbing both of Ned’s arms to pin them and Jopson pressing one hand to Ned’s waist, the other to his cheek.

Ned screams as they try to hold him down, Jopson soothing him all the while; “It’s all right, love. Nothing here will hurt you. We’re safe here. You’re safe here.”

Solomon holds fast while Ned struggles in his grip, and he wrestles him enough to wrap his arm around Ned’s shoulders, pulling him flush against his chest. Ned writhes even more, his cries lessening to pitiable moans as some of the fight drains from him. With tears falling steadily down both cheeks and dripping from his nose, he sags against Solomon.

“Shh, there, that’s all right, Ned,” Jopson says as he strokes the sweaty strands of hair from Ned’s forehead and thumbs away the tears.

Jopson sits back on his heels. He looks exhausted, with a pinched muscle in his jaw and his eyes glassy. He gives Solomon a knowing, if resigned look.

“Has this happened before?”

Solomon hesitates, his frown hidden by the top of Ned’s head.

“Last month.”

Jopson closes his eyes and smiles, the curve of his lips warping into an ugly grimace. When he reopens his eyes, he starts to say something more, but a loud howl from outside interrupts him.

Followed by another, then a third, and fourth. The howls are close to the cabin. Ned starts to panic again, and he thrashes against Solomon’s hold. The noises ripping from him are no longer human, no more sobs or cries, but growls, snorts, gnashing of teeth. He kicks his legs out, and Jopson nimbly leaps out of the way. Ned arches, shoving away from Solomon.

“Ned—”

The name halts on Solomon’s tongue, rancid as bad meat.

Ned is facing him, poised on all four limbs. His eyes are wild and bloodshot. He lets out a low growl. It is the same, the exact same, as when Ned looked upon him a month ago with nothing but violence and fury in his animal face.

He scrambles out of the way when Ned lunges forward, and luckily for Solomon, he was not Ned’s intended target. He goes for the door, yanking the latch open, with enough force to nearly rip it from its hinges, and he races out into the windy, moonlit night.

Jopson bolts to the door, staring after him. Solomon staggers to his feet, panting as hard as if he’d just run a mile. Howls echo in the wood, loud as thunder, but what’s more terrifying than the howls, than the moon, than the snarling growls following Ned’s footsteps into the trees: Jopson glances at him. The moonlight paints his skin as white as the snow. He is horribly calm, and that frightens Solomon most of all.

“I’m following him,” he says in a low voice. “Bring your gun.”

He walks out the door without coat or shoes. By the time he reaches the bottom of the steps, Solomon blinks, and he’s gone.

⚒

Solomon learned from last month, so he grabs the lantern before he goes. He also remembers his mittens and muffler this time, though his hands still shake (from far more than cold), and his lungs constrict (from far more than tears). He sucks in every breath, determined not to cry. The tears would blur his vision and freeze to his cheeks. He tries to follow the trail left by Ned (no discernable path from Jopson). Neptune hovers nearby, and Solomon keeps him in his periphery. He is the only anchor preventing him from washing away into a bottomless panic.

He hears howls ahead, and he picks up the pace. The snow is not deep. He sinks only to the ankle. But it is soft and powdery. His boots slip — no time to attach snowshoes — and he has not gone even a quarter mile from the cabin when his calves begin to burn.

Under the garish light of the moon, with hoots and howls stabbing the infernal quiet, his fears begin mocking him around every turn. He blinks and sees glassy-eyed Gibson buried to his neck in the snow. He sees bones of ribs and spines protruding from massive lumps of snow on the ground; shapes he tries to believe are in fact boulders or stumps. A snarl bounces off the trees, and he fears that he will crest the hill and come face to face with Ned in his monstrous canine form, who will then advance on him and cut him to ribbons.

Worst of all, he fears (he knows) that he will not have the courage to shoot Ned again.

The howls are growing closer, louder; tossing in the wind, interspersed with whimpers and snarls. Solomon knows he is on the right path when he holds the lantern high and sees a tree with several branches snapped and strewn about the ground. Blood is smeared against the bark like sap, and viscous clumps of it drip onto the snow. He follows where the blood leads, hoping that it is neither Jopson nor Ned at the end of the trail.

Something rustles to his left, and in his panic he nearly drops the lantern. He aims blindly into the shadows. An animal growls, before there is more rustling, and the noise shifts to a whimper, followed by the sickening crunch of bone. Solomon starts to quake, the lantern rattling where it’s hooked to his coat, but he keeps the barrel of his rifle raised. Footsteps advance toward him, and he expects a gruesome beast to emerge.

It is only Jopson. Blood coats his shirt, undermining his normally genteel appearance. His eyes are wide, mouth hanging open, but his voice is steady.

“I saw Edward heading west—” For a split second, Solomon wonders how the hell Jopson can orient himself in the dark, until he remembers the stars, recalling that Jopson, like Ned, had been a sailor. “—but I lost sight of him. Don’t worry about the wolves. I’ll handle them. Please…” Here, his voice starts to tremble. He grasps Solomon’s arm and clings. “Please find him. Find him before they do.”

Trust is a delicate and horrible gift, and Solomon curses himself for nodding, for being the source of Jopson’s visible relief. He squeezes Solomon’s arm again, frightened eyes searching his, and then he is gone, slipped underneath the night’s shroud.

 _West._ He glances at the sky. The moon is bright, floating above the trees near the horizon, and the aurora spirals around it in deep shades of blue and green. He seeks direction among the stars, though he knows none of their names, none of their formations, none of their stories — but that one, the North star. That one, he knows; and that one, he follows.

He is slow, wielding lantern and gun. The snow billows against his boots and trousers, and every noise around him makes him stop and point his rifle at any creature in the woods.

 _West,_ Jopson told him.

He heads West.

⚒

He finds Ned by the river. The water is frozen solid, the ice clear and shockingly silver under the light of the moon. Ned stands by a tall fir, his clawed hands scraping and digging into the trunk as he groans in a garbled voice. Solomon leaves the lantern by a thicket, its bare branches like a skeleton in the winter. In a whisper, he commands Neptune to stay put. He keeps his eyes trained on Ned’s back, his limbs and neck unusually long in this monstrous form. Ned sags onto the ground, his arms looping the tree. A plaintive whine slithers from him, and as Solomon edges closer, he lowers the rifle.

He doesn’t know what to say, but he forces himself to speak.

“Ned,” he says, his voice catching. He clears his throat and says again, louder, “Ned? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

Ned snarls, then sobs, his head hanging low. His arms fall from the tree, and he paws restlessly at the ground. Solomon takes another step, and his foot slips through the snow, crunching gravel under his heel.

“ _Don’t_.”

The word is hoarse, so mangled from the voice he knows that Solomon almost doesn’t recognize it as Ned.

“Please, don’t,” Ned continues, each word halting. Talking seems to pain him. He’s breathing hard, his hands digging into the muddy snow. “I…I don’t want to hurt you.”

Still, Solomon moves closer. Bile rises in his throat, and his heart beats so violently that he fears it may burst from his chest. He remembers the beast he saw in Ned’s eyes last full moon, but here is Ned; monstrous, perhaps, but lucid, sane, Solomon’s friend and lover.

Solomon sets the rifle aside in the snow.

“Ned, look at me.”

He does.

Through the dark fur, long snout, and sharp teeth, Solomon recognizes the man. He reaches for Ned, beckoning.

“You’re all right,” he says. “You’re fine, Ned. You’re fine. You won’t hurt me. You won’t hurt yourself. We can go home.”

Ned closes his eyes, moaning when another wave of pain overcomes him. His lips pull back, baring his teeth, and his limbs buckle beneath him while he gags. Solomon is close enough to touch him. Terror courses through him, his heart rapid and uneven, but he does not grab Ned in time before the other wolves advance. Tree branches snap in the woods behind him, accompanied by their snarls. Neptune panics and bolts to Solomon’s side. Solomon scrambles through the snow for his rifle.

He cannot see them, but he hears one of the wolves bark, its paws thudding against the ground as it runs. He readies his gun, aiming blindly.

Jopson’s voice bursts from the trees.

“Edward, run!”

Solomon whips his head to where Ned is crouched by the tree. A large black wolf sprints from the woods, charging at Ned. Jopson runs from the woods as well, looking wild. Blood splatters across half his face, and dark strands of hair fall into his eyes. His shirt is torn, exposing skin and scratches along his chest. He screams _Edward_ again, but it is too late.

Ned looks up in time for the wolf to leap on top of him. It sinks its teeth into his neck with a growl. Ned howls in pain and claws at the wolf’s belly, but it clings to him. It rips a large chunk from the meat of Ned’s shoulder, but it loses its hold, landing onto his rear legs and crumpling. Solomon realizes that the wolf is injured. A cut oozes on its back haunches. One glance to Jopson, smeared in blood and gore, confirms that he was fighting the wolves himself.

Solomon aims his rifle, ready to take another shot at the wolf, but Ned is no longer passive. He roars and springs from his feet, swiping his claws at the wolf. The wolf stumbles out of the way but yelps when Ned catches him in the ribs. Limping, the wolf rushes to the riverbank. Its fur stands up straight, and its eyes practically glow with its anger. It cranes its head back at them, baring its teeth in a growl. Ned lunges, snapping his jaws. The wolf leaps as well, meeting him in the middle, where they collide with a meaty thud, but another yelp rips from him when Ned’s jaws clamp around his front leg. Solomon hears the bone crack.

The wolf struggles, and one of his paws scratches at Ned’s face, slicing through the skin near his eye. Ned grunts and reels back, releasing his hold on the wolf’s leg. Solomon raises the rifle again, centering the injured wolf in his sights. The wolf watches him with keen intelligence, but it is too wounded to run or attack. Solomon lays his finger on the trigger, but Jopson beats him to it, rushing past both him and Ned.

Solomon’s blood turns to ice when he sees Jopson’s face: that of the phantom, skin as pale as bone, emaciated and cruel, and eyes black, so black that they resemble cavernous pits more than eyes.

Jopson roars, and with inhuman strength, he grabs the wolf’s scruff and single-handedly throws him onto the river’s ice. The wolf lands with a sickening thud; ice fissures blossom in all directions around him.

The wolf lies stunned for long enough that Solomon wonders if the impact snapped his neck, killing him. But the longer he looks, he sees the subtle rise and fall of its ribs. Jopson stands by the ice, drawn to his full height, keeping guard at the riverbank, between the wolf and Ned. His fist clenches and unclenches at his side, but he otherwise does not move.

The wolf finally struggles to its feet. The ice cracks again, sharp metallic clangs that, Solomon thinks absurdly, sound almost like the mechanic chiming of a clock. Or a gun, misfiring. The wolf growls, facing Jopson’s challenge, but it looks at the ice with growing discomfort as it continues to creak under its weight. The wolf’s ears go flat, tail tucked between its legs, and it crawls toward the opposite bank. Solomon considers ending the thing’s misery and trains his sights on it once more, waiting.

When the wolf reaches ground, it throws its head back and howls.

No call answers him, though Solomon hears Neptune fuss nearby, and Ned flinches at the noise. The woods are silent, no other wolf responding to its distress.

Across the river, the wolf wails another long howl. It’s desperate, Solomon realizes. The howl ends in a whine before the wolf lowers its head, regarding the three of them with disdain. It growls again, purely for show. It cannot do any more harm. Solomon lowers his gun, out of some kind of pity.

The wolf limps toward shelter, away from them. Blood collects in small puddles on the snow, marking its crooked path to the trees.

Once it reaches the thicket of shadowy firs, the thing straightens onto its back paws and walks into the woods like a man.

⚒

( _who lived here before you, solomon?_ )

⚒

Jopson crouches before Ned. Although his clothes are in disarray and his hair a tangled mess, he looks like an ordinary man once more. He frowns as he whispers Ned’s name. Solomon watches, feeling some of his fear return. Neptune whines, pressing against Solomon’s leg.

When Jopson touches Ned’s shoulder, he recoils and lashes out, inches from cutting Jopson across the cheek. Jopson blocks the strike with ease. He closes his hand around Ned’s furred forearm. Solomon sees the strength in that grasp even from several yards away.

Ned growls, his arm shaking as he tries to break Jopson’s hold, and Jopson keeps his eyes focused on Ned’s face until some of the tension finally saps from him. His hand goes lax, and Jopson gently lowers his arm, maintaining contact as he brushes his fingers past Ned’s elbow, to his bicep, shoulder, neck, and lastly his face.

Moaning, Ned twists and writhes when his foreign body shifts beyond his control, but Jopson holds him steady. He presses their foreheads together, whispering _Edward_ again and again until Ned leans on him entirely. Jopson looks comically small holding up Ned in his wolven shape. He loops his arms under Ned’s, holding him in a tight embrace. Whimpers come in bursts from Ned, but he is increasingly calm. He buries his snout into the crook of Jopson’s neck, who continues whispering to him. He kisses Ned’s temple and raises his eyes. His gaze meets Solomon’s across the way, and Solomon nods to him. He stands, fixing the rifle’s strap over his shoulders. He pats Neptune’s head.

“Let’s go home, boy.”


	9. Home

**Winter.**

****

The walk back to the cabin is slow, and the hour weighs on Solomon’s body as they trudge through the snow. The lantern lights their way when the thick firs block out the moon, and several times, Solomon stumbles. Jopson, with Ned’s hand held in his, always goes to him and helps him stand.

“We’re almost home,” he says each time, until Solomon hears the quiet assurance echo inside his mind, in time with every haggard step.

At some point during the hike, Ned reverts to his human shape, and he collapses onto Jopson. His clothes hang off him in tatters. He is conscious, but his eyes are heavy-lidded, his breathing shallow. Jopson scoops him into his arms and nods at Solomon.

“I have him,” he says.

Shouting has roughened the edges of his voice. He sounds as exhausted as Solomon feels, moreso given all the unseen wolves he fended off in the shadows. Now that Solomon’s heart has calmed down, he feels the weight of each leg dragging through the snow, and without any wolves nipping at their heels, it’s hard to resist the urge to lie down onto the ground and fall asleep.

When they reach the clearing, the familiar angle of the cabin jutting from the snow, Solomon lets out an audible sigh. Neptune darts ahead, scratching and whining at the door. Solomon doesn’t blame the dog. A long thaw and nap by the fire sounds heavenly. He could also do quite nicely with a glass or two or three of drink as well. He holds the door open for Jopson to carry Ned inside, and when they pass, Ned’s eyelids flutter, a quiet groan rumbling from him. Solomon shoves the door shut, hurrying to their side. He places the flat of his palm on Ned’s sternum, rubbing at the exposed skin. The contact soothes Ned, and he sighs, eyes briefly opening and closing. His skin is warm to touch, despite the temperature outside, and Solomon continues to brush against his chest as he stares at Ned, the flush across his nose and the scab over the cut on his cheek.

Jopson shifts under Ned’s weight, tactfully clearing his throat.

“I’ll take him to the bedroom. I imagine he’s tired.”

Solomon steps away. He’s clumsy on his numb feet and bumps into a kitchen chair as he sets the lantern on the table.

“What about you?”

Jopson dismisses the question, as he pushes the bedroom door open with his shoulder. Neptune follows. Left alone, Solomon stares at the lantern for a long time, until his eyes are sore from the light. He sighs, a noise that travels from his feet to his head. He finally removes his hat. The room is cold, the fire having died out hours ago. The embers in the grate are a faint red around the edges, but Solomon lacks the energy to rouse them. He replaces the gun on the shelf, grateful and oddly disappointed that he never had to fire a bullet.

He hears bits of a murmured conversation sliding from underneath the bedroom door. Nerves flood him, and he steers himself to the fireplace where he stoically starts to prod at the embers. He grabs fresh wood from the stack by the hearth, and the clamor of logs hitting the grate is enough to bury whatever is being said between Jopson and Ned.

By the time Jopson leaves the bedroom, the fire is roaring. Solomon has sunk into an armchair and has stripped to his flannel shirt and trousers, socked feet propped up on the hearth. He nurses his second glass of gin, the drink sufficiently warming his belly but neglecting the anxiety clouding his head.

Jopson retrieves a shirt from the trunk. His feet are still bare, at some point having lost even his socks while traipsing through the woods. But despite the ragged shape of his clothes, he appears untouched by either wounds or frost. Solomon looks away, keeping his eyes trained on the fire. He hears the rustling of cloth as Jopson discards his ruined shirt and pulls on the new one. He silently moves into view, wearing the clean shirt. It’s tight across his shoulders, and Solomon realizes with a start that it must have been tailored for Ned, instead of Jopson.

Jopson glances at Solomon and immediately away as he perches on the edge of the other chair. He tugs on a pair of socks and begins to lace on his boots.

Solomon empties his glass.

“You going back out?” he asks incredulously, staring at the light refracting through the glass, rather than at Jopson’s uncanny eyes and face.

Jopson pauses, finishing one shoe. He contemplates an answer, but he just shakes his head and plucks the second boot from the floor, loosening the laces and shoving his foot inside.

Solomon itches to say something more, wanting to demand answers for what the hell he saw out there. A softer side of him wants to ask after Ned, wants to sidle past Jopson and lie down on the bed beside him and sleep for three days straight. Another glass of gin sounds nice as well, but he can’t fathom how he could walk past Jopson sitting there; how he could resist the man’s cold composure before he would inevitably lash out, wanting to fight something, wanting to hit something, wanting someone to hit _him_ and clear his goddamn head, beat him senseless until every minute of this dreadful night is wiped from his memory—

Jopson stands, and Solomon winces.

He lets Jopson take the glass from his trembling fingers — oh, there’s that spike of anger coiling along his spine as dangerous as a snake poised to lunge — but Jopson steps away before he can bite. He sets the glass on the side table, waits, hesitates, then murmurs a soft _goodnight,_ and leaves him. He climbs up the ladder to the loft with preternatural grace. The ladder doesn’t even creak as he ascends.

Solomon’s hands close into fists on the arms of the chair until the urge to hurl the glass at the ladder subsides. He leans forward with a ragged sigh and drags his hand down his face.

For the first time in a long while, since before Jopson, before Ned, before Neptune ( _Wolf_ ), he is alone.

He considers grabbing the gin, forgoing a glass as he empties the rest of the bottle, but even that requires more energy than he currently has. Instead, he folds his arms over his chest. His chin droops forward, and as he blearily stares at the fire, the crackle of wood as sweet as a lullaby, he falls asleep.

⚒

It feels like hours later when he wakes, the fire having died down to little more than a weak glow. He stands with a wince and groan, rubbing his low back until the twinges cease. He throws another log onto the grate before glancing at the clock. Not even two hours have gone by, so Solomon decides to join Ned in the bedroom. He leaves the parlor with the weak fire, his boots abandoned by the hearth, and his smudged glass and the near-empty bottle of gin on the side table.

Entering the bedroom, he is relieved to see the curtains closed, though his eyes smart from the sudden darkness, and he has to feel his way around the furniture until his hand pats the unoccupied side of the bed. He strips to his long-johns and socks before sliding under the quilt.

Neptune whines from the foot of the bed, standing long enough to turn around before settling again. Ned’s breathing is relaxed and even. Solomon — feeling goddamn selfish but also mighty miserable, if he can forgive himself for either — places his hand in the center of Ned’s back. Nothing changes in Ned’s breathing, and Solomon feels the rise and fall of his back under his palm. He rubs his hand in circles until Ned sighs and turns to face him, still fast asleep.

Solomon can just make out Ned’s face; the curl of hair over his forehead, the line of his beard. The cut under his left eye looks less serious in the dark, and he lightly traces his thumb around it. The bite is cleaned and patched, Jopson’s handiwork looks like, and Solomon knows from last time that the wound will heal within the week.

Fear engulfs him, as images of Ned leaving (ned _dying_ ) plague Solomon. He blinks and sees Ned disappear before his eyes, leaving him alone in an empty bed. He sees the wolf on two legs. He sees the black-eyed phantom. He sees all of them in an instant, and he knows now, deep down, that Ned was always an interloper, that his time here with Solomon was an accident.

He blinks, and sees the wound on Ned’s shoulder reopen, where he had grazed Ned with a bullet a month ago; only now his monogrammed knife stares back at him, where it’s lodged inside Ned’s bleeding body.

Solomon recoils like he’s been burned. Ned frowns, even in sleep, and shifts closer, but Solomon is wide awake now. He slides from the bed, pulls his trousers back on, and leaves the bedroom, shoving the nightmares from his mind.

⚒

Solomon bundles up to check on the animals. It’s a decent excuse to remove himself from the cabin. Maybe he can stay in the barn forever, he thinks with a snort as he wraps his muffler around his face. _I’ll cozy up in Cricket’s stall. Certain she won’t mind_.

The wolves spooked him enough that he circles around the barn first, casting lantern light on the ground, searching for any disturbances in the snow or among the trees. The wolves are all gone — at least the ones that attacked, that is. He still doesn’t trust the trees and their secrets for as far as he could throw them. Walking to the barn’s door, he picks up the pace when some nocturnal creature hoots in the distance. Be it animal or his damn imagination, Solomon’s not keen on taking any more chances. Not this winter, at least.

Once inside, he eyes Cricket. She’s asleep with her back turned to him. She must sense his presence on some subconscious level, because she stomps her front hoof and flicks her tail. Solomon leaves her be, going straight to the coop. The hens are restless, and some of their feathers lie on the floor of the coop from their fluttering and preening. Solomon talks gently to them, nodding whenever one of them issues a shrill complaint. He strokes the calmer one, who puffs up her feathers and then settles. The pair of them watch Solomon as he sweeps out the feathers and their excrement. They cluck grumpily as he feels for eggs, but there aren’t any this morning. He leaves the coop, slowly sliding the door shut so he doesn’t further disturb them.

Tulip and Tess are sleeping as well, but as he fills their feed bucket, they stir, loudly mooing at him.

Solomon chuckles as he rubs Tulip’s flank.

“I hear ya,” he says, patting her again when she snorts.

Cleaning their stall and freshening their hay is rhythmic, comforting for how familiar it is. As he works, he feels less anxious, less like the cabin will be on fire or the floorboards drenched in blood when he goes back. He starts to hum under his breath, the tune faltering when a flare of panic grips him. Tess stares at him knowingly, blinking her large eyes at him. Solomon caves. He hugs her neck, pressing his face against the side of her head as he tells them everything — about the old man, about Ned, about Jopson, about the wolves, and about how the nagging fear that he is about to lose everything that he’s built for himself here.

Tulip and Tess listen. They always were good listeners. By the time Solomon finishes, his face is flushed and damp from a few stray tears, but he feels better, as though some kind soul has offered to carry his burden for him. His back straightens as the weight lifts from his shoulders.

⚒

As he walks back to the cabin, Solomon sees light shining out the tower’s uppermost window. He frowns. He didn’t notice it before, but he assumes the light comes from Jopson’s candle. Once he is inside the cabin, he glances toward the ladder. He stands at its base, staring up at the tarp for a long while before he summons enough bravery to climb.

Both the loft and the paint room are completely dark. Solomon continues climbing. When he reaches the top, it’s the warmth he notices first, a distinct change from the last time he ventured here. He peers over the edge of the trap door to see Jopson sitting in the chair by the window, where the flame of the candle reflects in the glass. He’s loosely hugging a knee to his chest, and his foot taps against the edge of the stove. Solomon can hear the crackle and pop of wood burning behind the square iron door, and the stove fills the room with comfortable heat.

Jopson turns to him with a smile.

“Morning already?”

Solomon shrugs, fully entering the room, the top of his head brushing the ceiling. The room is still cramped, certainly, but the fire makes it seem cozier than before. It feels safe.

“Couldn’t sleep well,” Solomon says as Jopson continues staring at him.

The answer satisfies him, and he turns back to the window. There is a pink tint on his cheeks, unusual for his porcelain complexion.

“Come sit where it’s warm.” When Solomon continues to hesitate, he adds a soft, “Please _.”_

Solomon takes the same place as before; near the stove, cross-legged on the floor, his back to the wall. He has to give the old man credit. For as crooked as the tower appears, it is solid. The wind whistles outside, making the wood creak and whine, but the tower still stands, a testament to its construction. A strong gust buffets against the chimney, banging out a childish, flute-like tune, and combined with the fire’s pleasant scent of charred wood and ash, Solomon relaxes and closes his eyes.

He starts when he realizes that he has begun to doze, his chin dipping toward his chest. Solomon jerks his head back, hard enough that it thuds against the wall. His cheeks burn when he notices the smile that Jopson halfheartedly suppresses.

“It’s almost nice up here with a fire going,” Solomon says, staring hard at his knuckles and boots.

Jopson agrees with a kind laugh, and they lapse into silence.

“I take it Edward is still asleep.” When Solomon says that he is, Jopson nods. “Good. He’ll need his rest.”

Solomon hesitates, but looking at the tension around Jopson’s mouth, he asks, “Was he…like that before you came here?”

Jopson’s lips thin, drooping. His foot stops tapping. “No, this is very recent.”

Solomon thinks of the two-legged wolf with a shudder. It’s too uncanny to be coincidence.

“When you were attacked, was it…” His voice trails. “When you and Ned were separated, it was—?”

He does not know how to finish the question, but Jopson blessedly understands his meaning.

“I assume the attack was also when the change took place.” He glances at Solomon, then back to the window. The sadness returns around his eyes. “He had no such malady like this back home.”

“Were you alone when you were attacked?”

Jopson sniffs. “No. But our guide was hardly more than a boy, and he disappeared after. No body.” He tilts his head. “I’d hardly be surprised if he helped plan the ambush, but he disappeared before I could snap his neck for him.”

Solomon almost shudders at Jopson’s matter-of-fact tone.

“What about you,” he asks with a swallow, sweat betraying his nerves. “Were you always…the way you are?”

Jopson regards the window and the morning outside. It is no longer pitch black. Courtesy of the approaching first sunrise, the air has adopted a dim, gray glow; a dawn stretched beyond her means.

“No,” he says in a small voice. He suddenly looks much older. “We were both men once. Untouched _children of God_ —” the words spat with uncharacteristic venom before his face falls again— “But corruption and the men who spread it wear many faces, I suppose. Strange to think that I was once free from this affliction. I feel as though I’ve lived many lives since.”

The question of how one goes from ordinary man to monster crosses Solomon’s mind, but he can’t think of a polite way to phrase it. Jopson must sense his curiosity, so he supplies something of an answer.

“I was very young and easy to impress. Apparently, all it took to woo me was a broad pair of shoulders in epaulets. Promises of a life together back home. Sweet nothings that amounted to exactly that: nothing.” His eyes acquire a glassy sheen. The sight of him holding back tears is nearly enough to rend Solomon’s heart.

“Edward wasn’t like that,” he continues; “He didn’t cast me aside like something broken. He didn’t think me wretched or awful. He took me as I was, and I was rotten with love for him. We came to Alaska for _me,_ for us. He nearly died for that. He nearly—”

Solomon moves to a knee, grabbing Jopson’s hands and clutching them tight between his own.

“He doesn’t blame you,” he whispers fiercely. “He wouldn’t want you blaming yourself.”

“He loves you.” Jopson takes a deep, ragged breath. “He won’t say as much. He’s modest with such things.” He closes his eyes before adding in a subdued voice, “He could have a life without me. I know that now. But I can’t bear the thought of living without him.”

“Stop that,” Solomon says. He clasps his hand on the back of Jopson’s neck. “He loves you just as much. A blind man could see that.”

When Jopson opens his eyes, Solomon tells himself to pull away, to sit back against the wall where it’s safe. When Jopson rests his hands on his shoulders, he tells himself that he should wish him _good morning_ and leave, promise him that he and Ned can stay until spring, that he wishes the best future for them.

When Jopson kisses him, Solomon tells himself to pull away.

Instead, he stays. He stays, and he kisses Jopson back.

⚒

“He wants to stay. He told me he likes it here.”

“Do you?”

Jopson doesn’t answer.

“Want to stay, I mean?”

“If my options are here with Edward or somewhere else, staying seems the obvious choice.”

“But do you _want_ it?”

“I want many things, Mr. Solomon.”

“It’s just Solomon.”

“Fine. Solomon. It doesn’t matter where I go.”

“You came here. You could have gone anywhere.”

“I would have gone anywhere. Our destination is not a concern for me. Alaska was Edward’s idea. I go where he goes. I follow him where he leads. Edward is my home. ”

“And if he stays?”

“I stay.”

“Will he stay because he loves me?”

A laugh. “I believe so, yes.”

“Do you love me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you love me?”

The candle snuffs out, pitching the two of them into darkness, except for the glow of the stove. Solomon leaves his hand on Jopson’s knee, and Jopson covers it with his own. His skin is cool on top of Solomon’s, and he does not pull away.

Jopson searches his face and says, “I think I will.”

⚒

Solomon and Jopson leave the tower together. After a quick kiss on Solomon’s cheek, Jopson goes to the bedroom to check on Ned. Solomon starts breakfast, and the smell of frying eggs attracts Neptune, who noses open the bedroom door and trots across the floor, sitting at Solomon’s feet.

“Sorry, boy. I’m cooking for more people now. Can’t give you as much.”

Neptune tilts his head, tail wagging. He huffs and cuts a tiny portion for him, which Neptune pounces on with drooling chops.

Jopson re-enters the room and fixes Neptune with a stern look when he sees him licking the grease off the floor.

“You spoiled thing,” he murmurs with no real heat in his words.

He reaches past Solomon for the kettle.

“There’s snow in the pot already,” Solomon says, nodding at the stove. “Just needs to boil more.”

Jopson hums and leaves the kettle on the stove before arranging the teapot and cups on the counter. Solomon dishes out the eggs, some days-old bread, the milk, and marmalade, carrying everything to the table as Ned walks out of the bedroom. He’s dressed, but he moves at a languid pace, his eyes still blurry with sleep. He pats Neptune’s head without any acknowledgment that he did so. Solomon chuckles, but the sound is cut short when Ned goes directly to him and embraces him.

Solomon’s free arm hesitantly circles Ned’s waist. He shoots a self-conscious look toward Jopson, but he pays them no mind while he brews tea.

Ned pulls away, looking faintly embarrassed. His brow knits together as he stares at anything but Solomon’s face before he pats both of his arms and moves away. He hovers by the table, but with Jopson pouring tea and Solomon placing the food (Neptune weaving around everyone’s feet), Ned removes himself to the hearth where he stokes the fire and adds more wood.

Jopson calls him over once the food and tea are ready. Ned hesitates, so Jopson goes to him, kissing his cheek and interlacing their hands.

A small smile pierces the gloom on Ned’s face, and he lets Jopson lead him to the table, sitting in the chair Jopson pulls out for him. Solomon offers to dish up people’s plates. Ned quietly thanks him, but Jopson holds up his hand. He shakes his head, fixing an errant strand of hair and smiling.

“Tea is enough for me.”

“Suit yourself,” Solomon says with a shrug, feeling foolish for assuming otherwise.

They eat in silence. While it is not entirely uncomfortable, there is a nervous energy, like electricity thrumming among the three of them. Solomon swallows only a few bites of food before Ned puts down his fork and clears his throat.

“Solomon, I wanted to say…” His confidence wilts, slowing his words. “I remember more now. Almost everything. I _assume_ almost everything. My memories are clearer than before.”

The revelation is hardly a surprise, but added to what Jopson told him in the tower, Solomon cannot help but scrutinize Ned.

“All right,” he finally says.

The offer for Ned and Jopson to stay sits in Solomon’s mouth, and the invitation barely leaves him when Ned speaks at the same time.

“You know that you and Jopson are welcome—”

“If it isn’t too much of an imposition, I would like—”

_To stay._

Thomas sips his tea, rolling his eyes fondly.

Solomon starts to laugh, deep from his belly. He presses a palm over his eyes and leans over the table, laughing hard enough that he might cry. He hears Ned huff, but when he uncovers his eyes Ned is smiling, his hand linked with Jopson’s on the table. Solomon’s eyes sting, but nothing can lessen the grin on his face.

“All right,” he says again.

⚒

After breakfast, Solomon argues with Jopson about cleaning up. Jopson only relents when Solomon wrests the dirty plates from his hands, and he joins Ned by the fire with a huff. He helps Ned redress the wound on his shoulder, their voices too soft for Solomon to make out any words. He resists the temptation to pause and listen. It can’t be _that_ private of a conversation, if it’s had only a few feet away. He frowns at himself, however, and heads toward the cellar. He’s bent over with his hand on the trap door when Jopson says his name.

He looks up and sees Ned standing on the rug before the fire, facing him. He is shirtless with a fresh piece of linen wound diagonally across his chest. His face is open and earnest, and he bravely meets Solomon’s eyes as he holds a hand out to him.

“Please,” he says; though for what, he doesn’t specify.

Solomon releases the trap door and crosses the room to Ned. Jopson stands directly behind him, his hands resting on either side of Ned’s waist. He watches Solomon, too, and when he meets his gaze, Solomon cannot deny the heat that courses through his belly.

Ned takes his hand, rubbing his thumb against his knuckles before raising them to his lips and kissing them. With a sigh, Jopson presses himself flush against Ned’s back, his eyes never leaving Solomon, even when his hands caress Ned’s skin and drift up his sides and under his arms. There they stay, petting Ned’s chest. Solomon looks away from Jopson to see the open-mouthed arousal on Ned’s face, and he closes the last few inches between them. When he kisses Ned, nose tickled by his beard, he can feel Jopson’s hand pinned between them.

Ned and Jopson move as one. When Ned breathes, it is in tandem with Jopson. When Solomon slides his hand behind Ned’s neck, he feels Jopson’s cool lips pressing against the same places Ned had kissed. When Solomon moans into Ned’s mouth, he hears the sound echoed by Jopson first, then Ned. He shivers when Jopson takes one of his fingers into his mouth. Solomon pulls away from Ned, both of them panting by this point, and moves his lips to Ned’s neck, kissing and sucking the sensitive skin there.

Fingers brush the fringe from his forehead, and Solomon opens eyes he doesn’t remember closing to see Jopson studying him. He grabs the front of Solomon’s shirt and pulls. Their mouths meet over Ned’s shoulder, a mess of teeth and tongue. Jopson’s free hand trails from Ned’s chest to his stomach, tugging at the waist of his trousers until he can slip it down the front. With an involuntary buck of his hips, Ned clings to Solomon’s shoulders with a groan. Solomon breaks the kiss with Jopson to coax Ned through his shudders; their kisses sloppy and wet as he murmurs against Ned’s lips. For every soothing word from Solomon, Jopson counters with a deft bend of his wrist or a lingering kiss on the nape of Ned’s neck.

Once Ned is quite breathless, Jopson puts his lips to his ear.

He murmurs, “Edward, love, we’re neglecting our host.” He bites Ned’s earlobe, before continuing in a growl; “Touch him.”

Solomon is untethered. His body feels as weightless as though he were dreaming, and with the pleasure comes a euphoria that Solomon fears will disappear if he closes his eyes too long or if he stops touching either Ned or Jopson.

Ned gives Solomon a chaste, close-lipped kiss before dropping to his knees. He lays another kiss on Solomon’s clothed thigh, and he drags his hands from Solomon’s ribcage to his waist where his calloused palms catch on his belt. He gasps when Ned nuzzles the line of his cock through his trousers, unbuckling his belt with clumsy hands, but Jopson interrupts his effort by tilting his jaw up and urging him into another long kiss. Ned undoes his trousers for him, and his hips jerk when he feels Ned’s fingers caress his lower belly, edging terribly close to his aching need.

It is a strange sensation, kissing someone who is not cold _,_ not exactly, but one whose touch is a shock, chilled enough for Solomon’s flesh to ripple. The contrast of Jopson’s cool kiss and the velvet heat of Ned’s mouth goes to Solomon’s head. He moans against Jopson who smiles into their kiss, pulling away with a laugh before taking Solomon’s bottom lip into his mouth and biting.

Ned is blissfully unaware of Solomon’s predicament. His eyes are shut as he works deeper onto Solomon. He moans every so often, and with his tongue running along the underside of Solomon’s cock, the vibrations from his throat are almost too much for Solomon. Jopson keeps him stable as he nuzzles his bearded jaw. He strokes the back of Ned’s head and guides his pace: when to quicken, when to slow, when to relax his jaw and swallow.

Solomon feels his peak fast approaching; from the heat in his belly to the nerves tingling up his legs. His hands tremble where he sets them on Ned’s shoulders, and his eyes slip shut. He focuses on stopping himself, on making it last.

Jopson must sense his wishes. He asks him, “Do you want to spill in Ned’s mouth now—” The man in question groans around Solomon’s cock. “—or would you rather we move to the bedroom?”

Solomon forces his eyes open. He expects to see a teasing smirk on Jopson’s face, but it is devoid of any mockery. His eyes are earnest and his face surprisingly serious. He pulls gently at Ned’s hair, and Ned releases Solomon’s cock. He rests his cheek on Solomon’s thigh while panting and looking up at them.

The air on his sensitive skin is sudden, and a shiver wracks Solomon. It is enough to stall his climax, making him desperate for all that Jopson and Ned can give and take from him.

“We have all winter,” he says.

Jopson laughs, kissing the side of his mouth.

“We do.”

Ned stands, his knees wobbling. Solomon wraps an arm around his waist to keep him steady, and the shy smile he receives in return makes his heart swell.

He clears his throat, glancing from Jopson to Solomon, with a growing smile on his face; “I, for one, prefer the bedroom.”

Jopson laughs again, a noise which Solomon knows he will never tire of, and he adds Jopson to the embrace, looping his arm around him as well.

They have all winter and more.


	10. Epilogue

**Spring, 1900.**

Winter lingers in the air, but the ground is dotted with patches of resilient wildflowers sprouting through the melt. The sun warms the back of Solomon’s neck, and the hike through the woods is pleasant as they make the long-awaited journey into town.

He releases Cricket’s reins to walk alongside her and Ned.

“Reckon we’ll get there by afternoon,” he says, squinting at the sunlight piercing through the branches overhead.

Astride Cricket, Ned nods. He clicks his tongue and pushes his heels into her side as he guides her around a tangle of roots in the path. She listens to Ned’s direction far more readily than she does Solomon’s. Even now, when she startles at some noise from the underbrush, Ned soothes her with hardly more than a pat on the side of her neck.

Solomon sighs, shaking his head. “Should I be insulted that she likes you and Thomas more than me?”

Ned glances at him, his smile coming easier now than it did in January. “I’m sure she likes you fine.”

“And I’m sure you can lie better than that.”

Cricket snorts, as if agreeing with Solomon on that sentiment. _There’s one thing you and I see eye to eye on, I suppose_. He fixes the strap of the rifle and pack on his shoulder, as the path begins to slope steadily upward. He and Ned are still a half-day’s hike from Dawson City, and Solomon hopes that the pile of furs he accumulated over winter will earn them enough to buy a second horse or perhaps a mule, as well as flour, sugar, more books for Ned, and perhaps a few swatches of pretty fabric for Jopson.

Jopson stayed behind at the cabin with Neptune. Solomon regrets leaving him, but the day he and Ned left — Ned only agreeing to go once Jopson had insisted with fond exasperation that he was perfectly capable of looking after himself and the animals for a week — Solomon checked on Jopson in the cellar to say goodbye. He discovered Jopson in the corner where they had set up a cot for him. The hermit’s paints were strewn about the floor, and he was sketching designs along the sides of the shelves and up the stairs leading to the cabin. Solomon asked him about it, confusion in his voice, and Jopson smiled, saying it gave him something to do.

 _It will pass the time,_ he said to Solomon while he dipped his brush into green paint and began a curling vine on the shelf. _The summer won’t feel so long now._

Solomon had shrugged, eyeing Jopson’s precise brush strokes with appreciation.

 _Don’t wear yourself out_ , he joked.

 _I_ _won’t._ Jopson gave him a private smile, accepting his kiss. _You and Ned hurry back._

The path begins to dip down again, and at the base of a hill is a wide creek that Solomon does not remember from the previous summer. He assumes it must be the extra melt from the snow. When they reach its bank, Solomon reaches for Cricket’s reins, but Ned dismounts and holds them himself. Fording the water is not difficult. Despite the width of the creek, the water is shallow and crystal clear. Traces of ice cling to some of the rocks under the perpetual shadow of low-hanging firs, and Solomon keeps his eyes on his feet as he hops from rock to rock. Ned follows him, carefully leading Cricket through the shallows.

On the other side of the creek, Ned doesn’t mount Cricket and walks beside Solomon instead. When Ned bumps their hands together, Solomon interlaces their fingers, holding on tight.

Contentment floods his chest, and Solomon realizes that he doesn’t care much about the city. With the sun bearing down, the birds singing, and Ned’s hand in his, Solomon doesn’t care if their journey takes another hour or another four days.

⚒

On the outskirts of town, they split ways — Ned going to the general store with Cricket and the furs, Solomon detouring to the Heathers’ house. He hopes to find Bill at home. Luck must smile on him today, for when he arrives on their porch, he hears the overlapping voices of both husband and wife through an open window.

It’s Maggie who answers his knock at the door, and she pounces on Solomon with a hug so ferocious she nearly knocks him down the stairs.

“Look at you,” she cries, holding his face between her hands. “Bill! Come see who’s here!”

Bill rounds the corner of the hall with their plump baby in his arms, and a great guffaw punches from him when he sees Solomon.

“Glad to see you alive and well.” He claps Solomon on the shoulder before firmly shaking his hand.

“Christ, is this Daniel?” Solomon asks; the baby staring unabashedly at him with a finger in his mouth. “He’s so big.”

Maggie laughs, taking the baby from Bill as they both usher Solomon into the house.

“You’re telling me,” she says as she carries him on her hip into the drawing room. She sets him in the bassinet by the sofa. “He’ll be walking and talking ‘fore I know it. As it is, he’s strong as a draft horse and crawls on every surface like he owns the place.”

With a twinkle in his eye, Bill elbows Solomon in the side. “He gets that from me.”

“Will you stay for supper?” Maggie asks, hurrying back to the kitchen. “You’re just in time for some fresh pie.”

He and Ned had a small meal an hour outside Dawson, but warm pie sounds miles lovelier than cured venison and tough bread. He accepts the offer and joins them at the table, as Maggie bustles around them setting down forks and plates. Daniel has hauled himself to his feet inside his bassinet, and he watches them with big eyes. The three of them talk of the town's gossip, the weather, Bill’s business at the mill, Maggie’s sister and newborn niece downriver, and Solomon’s plan for his small farm. They each talk rapidly over one another, trying to squeeze in every second and hour that they missed over winter, and Solomon regrets having to finish a second slice of pie, not wanting this visit to end.

“How’s the cabin? Still standing, I hope?” Bill asks as he scrapes the final bites of berry filling off his plate.

“Yeah, it held up all right.”

“Didn’t get spooked too bad by no moose or bears?”

Solomon scoffs. “It’d take a lot more than that to run me off.”

Maggie eats more slowly than Bill, chewing her food as thoughtfully as her words. “How long are you staying in Dawson? You know we’ve always got a bed for you.”

With a grateful smile, Solomon shakes his head, pushing his empty plate forward. “That’s kind of you, ma’am, but I’m anxious to be home.”

A knowing, if mischievous smile, blossoms on her face. “ _Home_ is it, now?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is.” Solomon’s face colors, and he dips his head, standing to fetch his hat and coat.

Bill stands with him. “You’re leaving already?”

“I’ve got business in town. I was just stopping by to say hello.”

Maggie clears the table, setting the plates down to go to Daniel when he begins to fuss. Bill walks Solomon to the door. He glances back at Maggie where she bounces the baby on her hip, and he pitches his voice low to Solomon, “Really, you are welcome to stay the night at least. Maggie was worried about you up there by yourself all winter.”

Once they’re outside, Solomon fixes his hat on his head, shading his face from sunlight. The streets are bustling with wagons and passersby, and through a gap in the buildings, he can see the river where it curves around the outer edges of the city, at the foot of the rolling mountains beyond. He sees Ned farther up the block, outside a brightly painted saloon. He sits on Cricket, with his collar popped up, his chin dipped low, as though he’s nervous for people to notice him. He lifts his face when he sees Solomon and Bill, but it is only when Solomon raises his hand that he starts to lead Cricket their way.

Bill glances between Ned and Solomon, his eyebrows high on his forehead.

“Well, if it ain’t the strangest thing, I wasn’t alone most of winter.” He turns to Bill, his face pleasantly flushed. “I have someone I want you to meet.”

Winter is a faraway dream, and Solomon no longer dreads either past or future. As snowdrops always bloom through ice, so too does the darkness hide its treasures.


End file.
